As with last Friday’s Forgotten Book, I read Thomas Perry’s Island twenty years ago, don’t currently own a copy, and apologize for any errors in fact.
Husband-and-wife con artists, on the lam from Miami mobsters after the brush-off phase of a successful long con goes awry, run aground on an unmapped sandbar somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.
A few chapters later, after spreading around some of the ill-gotten green, they’ve established their own country.
Before long, their man-made island nation has been turned into a well-appointed paradise, and some of the world’s older nations begin to take notice -- and the real trouble begins…
Island (1987) is long out-of-print, and seems to have redheaded-stepchild status among Thomas Perry’s books (there’s no mention of it on the author’s website); his books since have been leaner -- paragons of the means-business thriller -- but I also enjoyed his earlier, shaggier novels, and especially this forgotten one, immensely.
I think it’d make a good summer reading material suggestion for the reading-averse, too. Fans of the television series Lost, or of the Sims, might take to the story.
Hell, there’s a little something for everyone: a long-con caper, angry mobsters, angrier banana-republic strongmen, the CIA, mercenaries good and bad, and the screwball-comedy chemistry of the couple/protagonists. And it all ends up somewhere unexpected…well, I never expected the ending, which takes “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and twists it into a balloon animal.
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2 comments:
Joe-I got in on my summing up post. Thanks for continuing along with me.
It's a pleasure, Patti.
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