Sea of Bones

by Ron Faust

Overview

Dan Shaw hopes to be a lawyer someday—if he can only stay out of prison long enough to pass the bar. Neither is likely when he agrees to help hotshot Florida attorney Thomas Petrie track down a slick con man who’s swindled a consortium of well-to-do Paradise Key clients out of $22 million. But the charismatic Victor Trebuchet and his sexy partner in crime are a lot more dangerous than anyone imagined. And the silken counter-sting set up in an Italian villa to snare the couple may end up trapping Shaw instead. With that much money on the line, anyone is liable to betray anyone. But in the meantime, Shaw’s living the high life and he’s in way over his head. Soon he may find himself doing hard time—or worse—in a watery grave at the bottom of Bell Harbor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620454480
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	04/09/2014
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

RON FAUST is the author of fourteen previous thrillers. He has been praised for his “rare and remarkable talent” (Los Angeles Times), and several of his books have been optioned for films. Before he began writing, he played professional baseball and worked at newspapers in Colorado Springs, San Diego, and Key West.

http://www.turnerpublishing.com/RonFaust.aspx

Read an Excerpt

I cleared the books and papers off the table. My examinations for admission to the Florida bar were scheduled for late July, just two months from now. I was a recent graduate of a night law school in a dubiously credited community college, and most of my friends predicted that I would fail the examinations on my first try. Conversely, a few non-friends, chiefly lawyers in the S.A.’s office, hoped that I might pass so that they could defeat me in court.

After dinner we carried deck chairs out onto the reef. The dog, tired and sore-pawed from chasing imaginary beasts all day, slumped at Martina’s feet with a self-pitying moan. The tide was still going out. It was a relatively cool and dry night for Florida in late May, and the moon-washed sky vibrated with stars. Many of those apparently solo stars, the astronomers told us, were actually distant galaxies, great spiraling systems which contained fifty billion or more stars. Stars, comets, planets, maybe other worlds. I looked for the Big Dipper, found it, and followed the bowl to Polaris. And there was a constellation of lights behind us, too—Bell Harbor, the sodium vapor lamps that lined the bayside esplanade, traffic lights, house lights, auto lights, and neons that bled improbable colors into the dark.

“All right,” Martina said. “What’s troubling you?”

“What makes you think I’m troubled?”

“I know you, buddy.”

“I’m serene,” I said. “Complacent, even.”

“You’ve been fine the last few months, Dan. And now this brooding again. Why won’t you ever confide in me?”

I had never found the courage to tell Martina about the day I had killed Raven Ahriman here on the reef (while she slept in the house), and disposed of his body at sea.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Just as polished, vigorous, lusty, frisky and occasionally athletic as its predecessor, Dead Men Rise Up Never. . . . Intricate plotting, fast-moving action, glittering dialogue . . . A great shocker.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A writer of enormous talent, a stylist to admire and a storyteller of great power.”
 —Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

“Faust writes beautifully . . . he reminds you of Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. . . . Faust has it all: lyrical prose, complex characters and provocative plots.”
—Booklist

“Faust’s clear, unadorned prose and his deft, pure characterization ring with the force of Hemingway or Graham Greene.”
—Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Just as polished, vigorous, lusty, frisky and occasionally athletic as its predecessor, Dead Men Rise Up Never. . . . Intricate plotting, fast-moving action, glittering dialogue . . . A great shocker.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A writer of enormous talent, a stylist to admire and a storyteller of great power.”
 —Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

“Faust writes beautifully . . . he reminds you of Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. . . . Faust has it all: lyrical prose, complex characters and provocative plots.”
—Booklist

“Faust’s clear, unadorned prose and his deft, pure characterization ring with the force of Hemingway or Graham Greene.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"This was the second day I watched the beat-up cabin cruiser search a grid pattern over the area where I had deep-sixed Raven Ahriman's corpse," declares Dan Shaw at the start of this literate crime thriller from Faust (Dead Men Rise Up Never). After this tantalizing hook, the story of whom Shaw killed and why gets set aside as he's roped into helping a friend investigate the case of Victor Trebuchet, a jet-setting con man who recently used a modified Ponzi scheme involving satellites and rockets to bilk residents of a wealthy Florida community. Shaw ends up in Italy living next door to Victor, who has assumed an alias and is about to reel in his next set of victims. A cat-and-mouse game, with Shaw and friends using themselves as bait, leads to a brutal showdown staged against a lovely Italian backdrop. Faust tells a thrilling story in lean, tight noir prose ("McNally and Cavaretta wore old-timer cop suits, shiny at the elbows and knees, with one-and-one-half-inch cuffs, and ties that had seen a lot of burgers and fries pass by"). The mystery of the flawed, complex Shaw and his past, duly unraveled by the end, adds another layer of excitement. Agent, Jim Donovan. (On sale Sept. 28) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly