Only Read The Last Resort as a Last Resort

The Last Resort: A Forgotten Coast Mystery by Sal Bianchi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm going to be generous and give this 3* only because I got this for free when I saw it in a newsletter. What interested me is it takes place in a small Florida town and I had recently read a Carl Hiaasen book and the first of John D MacDonald's Travis McGee books which also take place in small Florida towns. How did this stack up? Not well.

You read Hiaasen with his great offbeat characters and MacDonald with the great neo-noir atmosphere and then you read this and it's like going from succulent lobster to a boiled store brand hot dog without even any ketchup or mustard. The characters and the town itself aren't really interesting at all. Most of them I couldn't remember because they have no personality. Mostly there's just the the chief who has probably the largest police force ever for such a small town. I mean there are like 5-6 people working there most of the time. How does some little podunk Florida fishing town manage to support the expense of that? The author mentions the chief was in the military and has a daughter in college but little to nothing is done with any of that. The only other character of note is Yamazaki (however it's spelled) who's an FBI agent who took vacation time to investigate a conspiracy theorist's death. There's some hint that there's stuff in her past, but the author does nothing with that either.

And then the worst of it is they don't even really solve the mystery! There's this key that Cole gets but it's never explained what it does. Other than catching one guy (which literally took almost 20% of the book) they accomplish almost nothing. I get you want to set up a series, but if you want me to read more books, you have to actually make the first one worth reading, which this isn't. I really have no interest in spending more time with these dull characters in their unremarkable town.

This could also have used a decent editor because there are a few phrases and bad dialog tags and such that could have been weeded out by someone competent.

That is all.

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