Manchineel

Peter Martin, of Peter Martin & Associates, is the founding publisher of
the Canadian Book Review Annual.

The improbably James Bondish hero of this action-adventure story, Skye
McLeod, is an exceptionally capable pilot, swimmer, diver, horseman,
birder, and lover. He is, moreover, a successful investor and an
oenophile of note (he teaches someone’s butler how to open a champagne
bottle).

Skye’s adventures take place in and around the eponymous island,
Manchineel, clearly a thinly disguised Mustique. Mustique/Manchineel is
a hideaway for the very rich in the Grenadines, a breathtakingly
beautiful arc of small islands in the southeastern Caribbean. One of the
residents is the petulant, frivolous, and drunken “Princess Helen,”
an obvious and cruel parody of Princess Margaret, who has a property on
Mustique.

A more important resident is the voodoo priestess, who steals the ashes
of Skye’s late wife to use in some foul ceremony. Skye cottons onto
this, snatches the urn of ashes from the voodoo altar and, sprinkles
them in the nearby ocean. The priestess, who has followed him, retrieves
the urn (along with a few teeth) and resumes the ceremony on a stormy
night. After the thoroughbreds from the nearby stable stampede and chop
the priestess into hamburger, she is still able to say, with her dying
breath, “I love you, Skye.”

The novel’s more weighty storyline involves a trade in human organs
harvested from living bodies and conducted in the soundproofed lower
decks of a large yacht. This tale is frequently amusing; unfortunately,
most of the humor is unintentional.