Book Review: Ruin Beach, DI Ben Kitto Book 2, Kate Rhodes
Mystery: Ruin Beach, DI Ben Kitto Book 2, Kate Rhodes
A young diving instructor is murdered during a night dive to one of the caves near the shore of Tresco. Tresco is the second largest of the Scilly Isles, within sight of DI Ben Kitto’s home island of Bryher, close enough for some to swim back and forth between them. A local boatman spotted the body, then went to get Ben to determine who it was.
Jude Trellon had been a competitive free diver before giving birth to her daughter and settling down. She lived with her boyfriend, Ivar, and helped with her family’s dive service, taking visitors out to explore the wrecks of ships from many eras that litter the sea floor around the islands. Jude was pretty and vivacious, popular and outgoing. She did not seem to have any enemies. Nobody appeared to wish her harm. Nobody, that is, except the person who killed her.
Who could that have been, though? Was it the sketchy couple she had most recently taken diving? Her brother, always living in the shadow of his sister? The boyfriend, a brooding newcomer to an island which does not have many immigrants? The ex-boyfriend, known to have never really gotten over the rejection? The bitter academic who was obsessed with finding an ancient Roman wreck? The recent high school graduate who worked with and worshiped Jude? Could it even have been her parents? Most murder victims know their killers, and on an island with few inhabitants but many secrets, someone who knew Jude wanted her dead.
What Ben Kitto does know is that a four-year old girl no longer has her mother, and he intends to at least be able to tell her when she is older why her mummy could not come home.
Again, the islands are so prominent in this series that they are almost a co-protagonist. Tresco is physically larger than Bryher. It is the second largest of the Scillies, with an economy built around tourism. It is the perfect place to have a dive shop, to run a hotel, to visit historic gardens in the old abbey, to study the wrecks on the ocean floor, to embrace the peacefulness and solitude of the relatively warm climate in this southernmost part of England. Kitto knows most of the residents here, and has known most of them for his entire life. Still, a detective cannot forget that even people he thinks he knows can commit murder.
Our thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for our copy of Ruin Beach, provided so we could participate in the blog tour for Team Scilly. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives on this novel, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Book Review: Ruin Beach, DI Ben Kitto Book 2, Kate Rhodes