Excerpt from Sun, Sand, Murder by John Keyse-Walker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After each tryst, I returned to my life as if what had occurred had never happened. I went to my shift at the power plant and drowsed to the hum of the generator. I poled my skiff, the Lily B, a sweating Yankee fisherman on the bow platform, and strained to spot bonefish through the mirror surface of the water. I ran my police patrol around the dusty washboard tracks we call roads on Anegada, stopping at the Cow Wreck Beach Bar and Grill to show the sunburned tourists sipping rum drinks that they were safe, despite the fact that the nearest real RVIPF officer was miles away on Tortola. I saw to Icilda's carnal needs, with a detachment she did not seem to notice. Or at least care about.

I was leading two lives, one dull, ordinary, and filled with virtue, the second risky, clandestine, and exciting. I knew that I should stop seeing Cat. It was the right thing to do and it was the only way to extract myself from this undiscovered mess. It was the only way to recover some shred of my self-respect. I resolved time and time again to end the thing I had with her. Each time I failed, weak, never raising the topic, succumbing to her smile, to the uninhibited joy of being in her presence, the danger, and the need of my body to have hers.

Now she rolled toward me, waking and showing her mischievous grin. The day's unspoken vow to end our affair would remain unfulfilled. I stroked the back of her neck. She arched herself into my body.

"Teddy. Teddy. You there? Pick up." The aging CB in the Land Rover, the only sure means of communication on Anegada given the lack of cell phone service and the unwillingness of the bureaucrats in Road Town to invest in an actual police radio, carried the urgency in Pamela Pickering's voice.

"Teddy. Teddy. It's Pamela. Pick up, please!" Pamela is Anegada's administrator, the island's only public official other than me. The eldest child of Pinder Pickering, Anegada's first administrator, Pamela believes herself to be Anegada royalty. She inherited her position when Pinder's consumption of Heineken forced him to make his de facto retirement to the Reef Hotel bar official. On his most alcohol-clouded day, Pinder was ten times as competent as the lazy and disorganized Pamela.

"Teddy. Teddy. It's an emergency!" Pamela squawked. The last emergency call Pamela had made to me was when her car was out of gas and she was in danger of missing the ferry to Tortola. It was not the first occasion she had treated me as her personal servant, though she had no actual authority over me. I usually acceded to her "orders"; it was easier than arguing with her.

I rose from the blanket and reached in the window of the Land Rover. Cat followed and curled against me, sliding a hand ever so slowly down my groin.

I grabbed the CB microphone, overcoming the urge to grab Cat instead.

"This is Teddy. Switch to the alternate channel." Everyone on Anegada monitored channel 16 like a party telephone line. There was no need for the whole island to hear Pamela turn me into her private taxi for the second time in as many weeks.

I flipped to the alternate channel. "All right, Pamela. What is the emergency?"

"De Rasta here, Teddy, De White Rasta, an' he say he found a dead man out at Spanish Camp."

Excerpted from Sun, Sand, Murder by John Keyse-Walker. Copyright © 2016 by John Keyse-Walker. Excerpted by permission of Minotaur Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.