It is summer in Cape Cod and Police Chief Dan Burke expects only the usual problems with the annual tourist influx: illegal fires, drunk drivers, inexperienced sailors getting lost, and kids experimenting with marijuana. Instead murder comes to town.

Fueled by a maniacal passion Mac “the Knife” Curtis, real estate developer extraordinaire, devises a contest for the region’s loveliest rose with the dual purpose of publicizing his latest development and revenging a perceived wrong from his tour of duty in Vietnam so many years ago. He believes “somebody stole his girl” and that somebody is Maurice Tomlinson, amateur rose cultivator, who is terminally ill from his service in Vietnam as a civilian defoliant expert. It was he who wooed and won Nurse Sarah Hillman with poetry and fine words rather than the coarse and violent methods of Mac.

Now the trio lives within a few miles of one another. The Tomlinsons are aware only of one another while Mac seethes with rage. He is totally evil with no redeeming qualities. He is a murderer, rapist, scourge of the environmentalists and also, no doubt, spits in the communal soup kettle. He is setting himself up as “victim.”

David Manuel introduces a cast of characters with only superficial backgrounds. This is especially upsetting when one of them kills Mac by gutting him with his own combat souvenir during a violent storm. Perhaps the author intended to toss in the proverbial “red herring” but there is not sufficient motivation given for the crime. The reader figures out the culprit and then must wade through pages of Burke’s attempts to trap him. Ultimately, Brother Bartholomew from the ecumenical community of Faith Abbey comes to the aid of his high school friend, Burke, solves the crime and catches the culprit. The Chief is equally hampered by over ambitious underlings and a virulent flu but knows who he can trust.

Bartholomew is the most developed character in the novel and finds himself rethinking his vows to God and his community when he meets again the woman from his past. Now in middle age he searches his soul for his vocation. Then his superior saddles him with a neophyte monk who mirrors Bartholomew’s younger self. Brother Ambrose transforms from annoyance to resourceful helper and aids in both Bartholomew’s personal crisis and that from the murderer.

Bartholomew draws on his own Vietnam experience to capture the evildoer and ensnares his personal demons at the same time. Despite storms, suicides, mindless slaughter of animals, fire, explosions, renegade bulldozers, and tissue thin alibis there is much lacking in this tale. Several loose ends are never sufficiently explained, such as that in the prologue. How was it done?

I would like to learn more about the Faith Abbey community and its residents and expand on the relationships of Burke, Bartholomew and his mother. Perhaps they will appear in another book, which will have more character and plot and is less an action movie with a cast of thousands.

--Jane Davis