Siren Song: A Suspense Novel - Softcover

Schwandt, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188259388X ISBN 13: 9781882593880

Publisher: Bridge Works, 2004

Synopsis

JP Griffin buys a small cabin cruiser and plans a carefree summer of boating on the waters surrounding Wisconsin's Door County peninsula, to escape the pain of a failed marriage. He learns that his boat was previously owned by a respected Green Bay cop who had just been killed in a car crash, and learns the boat he purchased is full of dark secrets.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Siren Song," a tale of past murder and present menace, is set in the upper Midwest, amid the woods and waterways where northern Wisconsin juts into Lake Michigan. Schoolteacher JP Griffin, in an effort to escape the pain of a failed marriage and the frustrations of his job, buys a used cabin cruiser and plans a carefree summer of boating on the waters surrounding Wisconsin's Door County peninsula. He gradually discovers the boat holds grim secrets left by its previous owner, Charles Parnell, a local cop who was killed about the time Griffin arrived in the area. Raymond Sloan Rudert, a local petty criminal, had suspected that Parnell had the thousands of dollars in cash that once belonged to Rudert's uncle, Harold Sloan, a retired farmer who died twenty years before when his car toppled into Lake Michigan from the Northport ferry dock. Back then, Sloan's death had been ruled an accident, but many believed he had been robbed and murdered because the cash he was rumored to carry with him was never found. It is JP Griffin who finds on his boat notes and other evidence that Parnell led a double life and had a direct link to the elder Sloan. When he follows clues in Parnell's notes and locates the missing cash, JP then faces danger from others determined to possess the money themselves. And as he copes with crime on the water, he also confronts an intense moral dilemma: Should he turn in the recovered funds to "the proper authorities" or the dubious "rightful owners"? Or should he take the untraceable money and run? In an explosive finish, JP must confront the truth of Parnell's double life while protecting his own dangerously compromised existence. Like the late mystery icon John D. MacDonald's character Travis McGee, JP becomes a complex, contentious, yet caring man who, while striving to remain fiercely independent, is nevertheless destined to be haunted by ghosts of the past and the future.

About the Author:

Stephen Schwandt is the author of five award-winning young-adult books, one of which was one of four finalists for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, bestowed on the best mysteries by the Mystery Writers of America. Schwandt, a high school and community college writing and literature teacher, lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and on Washington Island, Wisconsin. He is a former regular book reviewer for the "Minneapolis Star Tribune." This is his first adult novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bridge Works
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 188259388X
• ISBN 13: 9781882593880
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240