Book Review - Murder in the Rough

Murder in the Rough
by J.S. Borthwick
St. Martin's Minotaur, March 2002
338 pages, $24.95
Sarah Deane & Alex McKenzie series #11

The recently opened Ocean Tide community is designed to be the ultimate in self-contained hometowns. Cottages, semi-detached houses, apartments and an assisted-living complex are set among an 18-hole golf course, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, and bike trails, and surrounded by white picket fences, the Atlantic Ocean, and a grove of trees. Manager Joseph Martinelli makes it a point to personally greet each new arriving resident and John and Elspeth McKenzie are no exception. The McKenzies have just sold their Cambridge house and have moved to Ocean Tide to become full-time Maine residents and to live close to their physician son, Alex, and his English professor wife, Sarah Deane.

Shortly after the McKenzie's arrival, a decaying body is found lying in the rough of the practice holes at the Ocean Tide golf course, apparently strangled by a plastic covered chain. As the chilly Sergeant George Fitts of the Maine State Police, assisted by the volatile Sheriff's Deputy Investigator Mike Laaka, continue their investigation into that death, a second body is found buried under bags of fertilizer in a shed just off the golf course. Sarah, in spite of her good intentions to not get involved with any more murder investigations, finds herself in the middle of the investigation when she is asked to tutor four children of two residents at Ocean Tide.

Then Elspeth's brand new expensive bicycle is stolen from the garage and Sarah finds out from the Ocean Tide staff that a rash of bicycle thefts have been going on for some time. Sarah and Elspeth start their own search for Elspeth's missing bike. To top off everything, John's Uncle Fergus McKenzie, a 90 year-old curmudgeon, invites himself to say with the McKenzies just as Elspeth is due to take her annual vacation to Provence, France.

Are the two bodies related somehow? Are the bike thefts a separate investigation or related to the bodies? And who is the yellow-haired teenage boy that runs at the sight of Sarah? Are the Ocean Tide employees just a little too perfect?

Murder in the Rough is a comfortable, straightforward cozy mystery with lots of wonderfully suspicious people. There's no need to read the previous books in this series in order to enjoy the easy-going characters and mystery in this book.

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