Title: Dauntless
Author: Lisa Henry
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 30k Words
Category: Contemporary Romance, Murder Mystery
At a Glance: Fans of a little light mystery with a side of attraction, if not love, at first sight will find both of those in this novella, and if I wanted a little more depth and detail, which I’d have welcomed, it’s because I would have gladly spent more time with the characters.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Joe Nesmith leads a peaceful life as the lighthouse keeper on Dauntless Island, a small island off the coast of Australia where the occupants are proud of their mutinous history and have very long memories.
When graduate student Eddie Hawthorne comes to Dauntless, he brings with him a historical diary that might just throw everything the islanders have ever believed into disarray—and one of them might even resort to deadly measures to make sure that Eddie’s research never sees the light of day.
When Eddie is attacked, Joe is drawn in to helping him discover which of the islanders could have done such a thing. The rising attraction between them doesn’t mean anything, right? It’s just a fling. But while Joe find himself wishing more and more that Eddie could stay on Dauntless, it’s clear that somebody else wants Eddie gone, permanently. And when the attacker escalates to murder, both Joe and Eddie find themselves in danger of Dauntless Island’s bloody history repeating itself.
Review: Lisa Henry’s Dauntless is a cozy little murder mystery with a side of romance set on the island that gives the story its name, a place where any- and everyone is a suspect, and where the motive for murder is entangled with pride of place and in preservation of the island’s own mutinous and murderous history.
While obviously not sharing many common details, Dauntless does have a Hatfields and McCoys family feud angle to it. Joe Nesmith’s and Eddie Hawthorne’s surnames carry a boatload (literally) of baggage along with them, which should make the two men natural enemies…at least in the eyes of the other islanders. Joe’s and Eddie’s great-great-great etc. grandfathers’ contentious (read: potentially murderous) relationship sowed the seed that has since flourished into a two hundred year long legacy of contempt for anyone with the last name Hawthorne, so when Eddie shows up on Dauntless Island to do research for his thesis—research that could very well debunk some of the island’s lore and rock it to its foundation—it goes without saying that he’s neither welcome nor wanted there. By anyone but Joe, that is. Joe’s interest in and attraction to Eddie from the moment the stranger arrives on the island can’t be denied
Dauntless is insular and takes care of its own, so what better place for an author to stage a crime than on an isolated island where the residents leave their doors unlocked, everyone is connected either by marriage or blood, and they have always policed themselves? When someone crashes Eddie’s tent one dark and stormy night in search of the diary he’s using as source material for his research, and then gives him a head wound for his trouble, it sets up the mystery and leaves Joe—lighthouse keeper, leader by proxy and, by virtue of his ancestry, near royalty—the only person interested in finding the culprit. A dead body turning up days later not only raises the alarm but escalates the stakes as well. It also leaves Eddie in the wind and the prime suspect for the murder.
Readers who enjoy a story with a setting that becomes a character in and of itself will find plenty of personality and an interesting backstory to Dauntless Island and its colorful cast of locals. The epithets added to the names so everyone could tell each other apart—think Red Joe in a long, long line of Joe Nesmiths—offered a nice touch and subtle bit of flavor to the characterizations. Clocking in at just shy of a hundred pages means that Henry keeps to the most essential details and, by necessity, focuses on the mystery and exposes the motives behind the murder in a bare bones, straightforward way, so fans of a deeper procedural with lots of twists and turns will want to keep that in mind. The buildup of the relationship between Joe and Eddie hits its stride quickly, and if I found myself wishing there had been more to it, that’s only because I liked what I got of them and would have gladly spent more time getting to know them.
Fans of a little light mystery with a side of attraction, if not love, at first sight will find both of those in Dauntless.
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