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The economy of a North Coastal California village is threatened when a water company targets the Perdido River as a prime source for an innovative and experimental water transfer system. The community is struggling to recover from the closing of a sawmill by targeting the eco-tourism industry. A North Carolina water company cuts a deal with the local owner of the defunct sawmill to use his property to launch a project to suck water from the Perdido River into huge bags, then float them down the coast to thirsty San Diego. There will be no compensation to Cape Perdido, title town of the book. The project would threaten the scenic river, change the ecology of the area, and quite literally dry up the fledgling river rafting and sport fishing industry in the region.
New York environmental attorney Fitch Collier, community relations specialist Jessie Domingo, and investigator Eldon Whitesides have been dispatched by a national environmental law firm to assist a local group, Friends of the Perdido, in an attempt to halt the project.
Joseph Openshaw was raised on the small Pomo Indian reservation outside Cape Perdido and has returned after college to work in his hometown. Steph Pace, a high school chum of Joseph's, owns a local restaurant and both are active in the Friends of the Perdido. As the New Yorkers work with the locals to pull the community together to save the river, old small town feuds simmer and the group starts digging for reasons why the retired sawmill owner would sell out his own town. When one of the New Yorkers mysteriously disappears after long concealed evidence surfaces in a tragedy Joseph and Steph were involved in twenty years earlier, Steph's business is threatened and her life is in jeopardy.
Marcia Muller evokes a strong sense of place in Cape Perdido with the foggy evenings, the tall, silent forests, and the roaring lumber trucks rumbling down the single busy highway through the heart of town next to the ramshackle businesses in the dying town. The decaying sawmill hides more than ghosts from the past for the locals and the outsiders.
CAPE PERDIDO is a stand-alone book, a departure from Muller's Sharon McCone series, but fans will recognize the tight and suspenseful plotting that has netted her many mystery-writing awards over a long and successful career.
For outdoor enthusiasts and mystery lovers alike, CAPE PERDIDO offers a chilling summer mystery leading to a fast-paced and gripping climax.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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