Ship Shapely: A Gil Yates Private Investigator Novel - Hardcover

Boyle, Alistair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888310995 ISBN 13: 9781888310993

Publisher: Allen a Knoll Pubs, 1999

Synopsis

Gil Yates investigates the death of a ship's captain, who mysteriously fell overboard while on a cruise with five gorgeous women near Hawaii

About this title

Review:

Before Les Quincy disappeared, he was a professional flagpole painter and a sexually profligate sailboat captain. The suspects in his disappearance, all shapely young women, served as his crew and took turns sharing his bed. If this sounds like a farce, it is. The action is just shy of slapstick in Alistair Boyle's fifth mystery starring private investigator Gil Yates.

Readers of the earlier books will know the premise: Yates is the alter ego of Malvin Stark, a plain brown wrapper of a guy with a dead-end marriage, a dead-end job, and a daughter who prefers his financial support to his proximity. As Gil Yates, the man sheds his drab covering, solves mysteries and makes enough dough to finance his hobby of raising rare and expensive tropical plants.

His client in this case is the sailboat captain's presumed widow. She provides him with pictures of the sexy suspects, and Yates gallivants about Hawaii, Tennessee, and California, interviewing them....

....His cynicism is centered mostly on his family, his quirky humor on the things he is enthusiastic about. Like certain words: "Dewlaps has always been one of my favorite words," he muses. "So descriptive; it has so much flair and panache. I use it at the least opportunity."

In a genre with a recent habit of explicit cruelty and violence, Boyle's light comic mystery, is, as Gil Yates would say, "a different kettle of gefeltefish entirely." -- FOREWORD MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 1999

From Kirkus Reviews:

The police call Les Quincy's death an accident, and why shouldn't they? Since the morning a year ago when the four lovely women he'd hired to sail his boat and share his bunk awoke to find him missing, there hasn't even been any hard evidence that he's dead. But the veteran skipper was much too far from Hawaii to have made it to shore, so either he unaccountably fell overboard in the middle of the night without waking anyone, or one or more of his five companions is lying about what happened to him. Les's widow Edna, determined to get at the truth, persuades dashing shamus Gil Yates (Bluebeard's Last Stand, 1998, etc.) to cut his usual exorbitant contingency fee to $200,000. So Gil packs his endless supply of malapropisms and goes in search of the five survivors of Les's last voyage: sexy Kay, southern belle Prudence, nude model Sooshe, drug-connected Elizabeth, and Bible-college-student Ruth. The women, vivid stereotypes alike only in their attractiveness, continue to insist they have no idea how Les ended up in Davy Smith's locker, but several of them seem unaccountably taken with Gil (``I like unthreatening men,'' Ruth tells him), and his investigation threatens to turn into five rounds of chastely described coupling before he rolls up the case. Though Gil's as charming as ever, the answer to this riddle isn't likely to sweep you off your legs. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen a Knoll Pubs
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1888310995
• ISBN 13: 9781888310993
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228