The Sea Detective
Caladh McGill, of Edinburgh, Scotland, runs Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations, which helps environmental organizations track oil spills, disasters involving fishing nets, and the like. He’s an expert on currents and other phenomena that affect how things get from one point in the ocean to another, and he’s spent years trying to find the body of his grandfather, who died at sea during WWII. He also likes to make political statements by planting flowers on the properties of politicians. Not the sort of fella you’d expect to find headlining a crime novel, but here he is, nevertheless, trying to help a young woman find out what happened to her friend, whose body was pulled out of the ocean. This is not your traditional amateur-sleuth story. Cal and the young woman don’t even meet until we’re about two-thirds through the book. The bulk of the story is taken up by illicit flower planting and Cal’s search for his grandfather’s final resting place. Still, by the end, we’ve come to see the engaging Cal as a viable lead for an ecocrime series. Quirky but appealing. --David Pitt