Husband and wife PI team Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont each have their hands full, but only Helen has to carry drink trays—in her latest dead-end job/undercover assignment as a stewardess on a private yacht…Lost at sea

To catch a jewel smuggler on a luxury yacht, Helen needs to pose as the ship’s new stewardess—but between serving drinks to the snobs, scrubbing floors, and cleaning up after seasick passengers, she’s starting to miss dry land almost as much as she misses Phil.

While Helen’s cruising to the Bahamas, Phil’s got his own job—trying to catch a sexy gold digger who may have killed her elderly new husband for his fortune. Good thing he’s a self-proclaimed master of disguise, playing it cool as everything from an air-conditioning repairman to a Rastafarian.

Helen’s a help to Phil in his case, but when she’s on her own on the high seas, Helen needs to watch her step as she searches out the smuggler—or she may end up going from undercover to overboard…

Review

When married PI team Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont agree to help Violet Zerling prove that her new stepmother (a perky, young brunette named Blossom) is trying to kill her rich, elderly father, they intend to spend the next couple of weeks working the case together; after all, they’re practically newlyweds, and Helen hasn’t been in the private investigation business for all that long.  But then yacht captain Josiah Swingle shows up at their doorstep, desperate for help in determining which member of his crew is using the ship to smuggle emeralds out of the Bahamas.  He’s willing to pay handsomely for their services – but the yacht’s scheduled to sail in just a couple of days.  Loath to turn away business (especially since their agency has yet to turn a profit), Helen agrees to go undercover as part of the yacht’s crew, while Phil stays in Ft. Lauderdale to bust Blossom.  Catching a smuggler is dangerous business, especially for a novice like Helen.  Does double the caseload mean double the success, or will Helen’s first attempt at a solo investigation leave Phil a solo practitioner? 

Final Sail is the eleventh of author Elaine Viets’ Dead-End Job Mysteries.  It’s a light, breezy, relatively entertaining read that would make for a great beach book.  That said, if you’re looking for something with some substance to it – something that will make you think, something that will make your heart pound, something that will make you care about its characters – you may want to focus your search elsewhere, because everything about this book feels just a little too slight.

The cases being investigated by Helen and Phil in this tale are the kind that just naturally lend themselves to action, drama, and intrigue, so I had high hopes for Final Sail; the Bahamian emerald-smuggling scheme, in particular, is one I’ve never seen done in a cozy, and when you put everyone on a yacht, it essentially becomes a locked-room mystery, which I love.  Unfortunately, however, Viets never really capitalizes on her setup.  I realize she’s trying to ramp up the drama and the tension by sending newbie PI Helen out on her own, but by splitting the focus of the story to feature two cases instead of one, Viets doesn’t do enough to develop the individual components of either.  The characters (Helen and Phil, included) are little more than cardboard cutouts, what minor action there is feels farcical and cartoonish, the pair’s “investigative techniques” border on the ridiculous (we’re talking something you might see in a bad sitcom), and the solutions to the mysteries are implausible at best.  Add to that the fact that Viets tries to shoehorn in a bit of drama relating to Helen’s utterly ridiculous and completely soapy backstory, and you have a plot that’s unfocused and book that’s ultimately rather unsatisfying.

Reviewed by Kat N.

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