Description:
From its incorporation in 1886 to the early years of World War II, Georgia's Jekyl Island played host to the Jekyl Island Club, where members controlled an obscene portion of the world's wealth and the fortunes and fates of men and nations were routinely won and lost. Brent Monahan, who is more commonly associated with vampires (1993's The Book of Common Dread and 1995's The Blood of the Covenant) and spirits (1997's The Bell Witch: An American Haunting), uses it as the site of an 1899 crime. Monahan pits Sheriff John Le Brun against none other than J.P. Morgan, as the former attempts to solve the murder of a club member and the latter attempts to dismiss the crime, for personal reasons, as the work of a local poacher. That Morgan is a man of enormous influence is obvious. That Le Brun is a man with powers of his own is demonstrated when a chess match he's playing is interrupted by an errant bustle and a rematch is logically proposed. "No need," Le Brun said, groaning softly as he bent low from his chair to retrieve fallen pieces. "It was pawn to king four, pawn to king four." He began placing the chessmen on the board. "Knight to king's bishop three, knight to queen's bishop three. Bishop to knight five, pawn to queen's rook three. Bishop to rook four, knight to bishop three. Knight to bishop three, pawn to queen three. Then pawn to queen four and pawn to queen's knight four. Your move." As it becomes abundantly clear that Le Brun is as far from being a rube in sheriff's clothing as Jay Gould is from standing in a soup line, Morgan parries and Le Brun thrusts amidst a shifting stream of adversaries and allies. These include newspaper tycoon Joseph Pulitzer, Judge Iley Tidewell and his son, Le Brun's chief deputy Warfield Tidewell, assorted robber barons and titans of industry, and any number of duplicitous, nefarious, and dangerously armed factota. In the end, Monahan has crafted in The Jekyl Island Club a well-plotted and richly peopled period whodunit that rises, with an almost imperceptible pitch, to a place where lovers of mystery long to travel but rarely seem to go. --Michael Hudson
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