2021-05-19
Forget the people. Santa Catalina Island is the star of this series debut.
Whitney Dagner left a lucrative but stressful life on the mainland and returned to Santa Catalina to open a gift shop and help run her semiretired grandparents’ glass-bottom boat business. Goldy and Pops enjoy life while Whit and her brother, Nick, conduct boat tours, including one for the Chamber of Commerce’s Person of the Year, the deeply unpopular Jules Tisdale, whose spacey wife, Tracy, is an old friend of Nick’s. In the middle of a series of tours, Nick vanishes, but he returns in time to discover Jules floating under the boat. After an initial interview, the cops fasten on Nick as the killer, and Goldy and Pops ask Whit to prove him innocent. Another problem arrives in the form of Whit’s ex-boyfriend Felix Ramirez, whom the local police have just hired as a diver. Not sure how she feels about Felix, Whit still accepts his help and that of her roommate, Maribel, who also works for the police. The manipulative Tracy had convinced Nick she was being abused by Jules, giving him a sadly plausible motive for murder and a reason to hide while a desperate Whit checks out the alibis of myriad people who might have wanted the obnoxious Jules dead.
Allan supplies an appealing hero, a meager mystery, and a glorious setting.
