Beached (2018) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning's debut novel, Adrift (2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure hunters and nautical archaeology.

Having now read both Adrift and Beached, I can say this series is closer related to the adventure genre (Indiana Jones and Lara Croft get mentioned in passing) that either the traditional detective story or modern crime novel.

Browning seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators (The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators novel. 

Beached opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during off season, "today a family of four made up the entirety of the LunaSea's manifest," when spots a dark shape in the water. Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water, warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea.

A gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, "Initium sapientiæ timor domini" ("Wisdom begins with the fear of God"), which turns out to be a Spanish escudos, a "portrait dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon ("pieces of eight"). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the Thirteenth Galleon ("...an old legend that tells of cursed gold"). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana, Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and "most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys." Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships.

The 1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory, dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase, who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a government archive and found "the coin, the manifest and a note hidden in the binding of an old ship log."

After the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the coin aboard the LunaSea, the pace of the story slows down as Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week, Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed ("what a difference a week made"). She scraped together a team to find the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the scene in which Mer ("...did most of my research in the Arctic, studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods") has a moment with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of Adrift. It really is like a novel from The Three Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll read in any juvenile mystery.

However, it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I also liked the balance between Mer's "Pandora-sized curiosity" and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment. Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well have been Mer's swan song.

So not sure whom to recommend Beached, because readers of this blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries of today.

Adrift (2017) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning is an FBI National Academy graduate who learned that police work is as much about documenting crime as it's about fighting it and now draws on her first-hand experience as "wonderful fodder for her current career as a full-time writer," which began with her award-winning debut novel, Adrift (2017) – a modern thriller that normally falls outside of my scope. Brian Skupin listed Adrift in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) with two intriguingly described impossibilities during a diving expedition and Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) intrigued me enough to search out more of these submerged locked room mysteries. 

So here we are and, while I was a little skeptical beforehand, Adrift defied expectations by not being an ultra-modern, character heavy thriller with some mild impossible crime elements.

There are still some notable modern touches to the characterization and storytelling, but the end result can best be summed up as Scooby Doo for grownups! It certainly is an interesting addition to Forsyte's Diving Death, Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968) and the Detective Academy Q 2003 episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea as an example of that rare impossible crime story set among divers. 

Adrift introduces Browning's series-detective and marine biologist, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who recently returned from a research project in the Arctic, but new research opportunities remained elusive and she took a job in the Florida Keys – teaching scuba diving and acting as first-mate to Captain Leroy. Story begins with the first of three (not two!) impossible situations. Mer saves a diver who's frightened out of his wits and claims to have seen a ghost, "green and kind of see-through" shaped "like a man," but the truly inexplicable part is that he was exploring the shipwreck of the USS Spiegel Grove and was fished out of the Molasses Reef. Five miles away with "the current's going in the wrong direction" and they were radioed that a diver had gone missing off the Spiegel. So how could the distressed diver travel five miles from the Spiegel Grove to Molasses Reef without "the use of teleportation, a TARDIS, or a wormhole."

The rescue and the diver's rambling is filmed, uploaded to social media and goes viral, which brings "a boatload of ghost hunters" to the Florida Keys to investigate the now most haunted spot in America.

Ishmael Styx, of Spirited Divers Paranormal Scuba Team, arrive shortly after the incident to film a documentary about the ghost of the Spiegel Grove for the Expedition Channel and they want to charter a boat for multiple, nighttime trips to the wreck – asking Mer to serve as a safety diver on the trips. The diving scenes is what makes the book stand out and excellently used the USS Spiegel Grove, purposely sunk in 2002 to make an artificial reef, as a setting for two ghostly impossibilities. Firstly, when they're inside the wreck, the underwater camera malfunctions and continues to strobe during which Styx vanishes. A subsequent rescue search of Spiegel Grove recovered his mask and a member of the paranormal diving team saw him looking at "the opening in the side of the ship," like "something scared him," before "something pulled him into the hole." Secondly, Mer returned to the wreck later in the story and witnesses the ghost with her own eyes, "green and hazy," lifting an arm and pointing at her, which is a blow to her rational, naturalistic and scientific understanding of the world. Someone who firmly believes "paranormal activity falls into the realm of pseudoscience" and "only one step above nonsense." Now the whole sordid case tied her good name to ghosts, mermaids and other supernatural phenomena.

Mer is practically dragged into the case to act as an amateur detective. She agrees to continue working on the documentary to spare her friends and colleagues a wrongful death-suit. When she nearly gets killed, the case became her business (and she has a point there), but that places her at odds with the police.

The scenes that take place on the surface, which is most of the story, show those previously mentioned modern touches to the characterization and storytelling. Such as an old summer fling of Mer, who has a secretive backstory, reentering her life and a traumatic, near-death experience as a child that convinced her there's nothing beyond the grave ("I've been to the other side. There's nothing there") or learning that Mel has a CD collection of movie soundtracks – which I understand is a trope of the contemporary crime novel. However, I liked Mer's clashes with a snooty news reporter or learning how to take fingerprints by watching YouTube videos.

Fortunately, these scenes never turn into overwritten, angst-ridden mini-biographies of the characters that push the plot aside. The primary focus of Adrift is always the ghostly activities at the shipwreck and the characters directly involved with it.

So how well does the plot stack up? You shouldn't expect a neo-orthodox detective story with sharp, multi-faceted clues and treacherous red herrings. The clueing is pretty crude and the leads to some of the most pertinent questions are not treated, or discovered, until very late into the story. Nevertheless, the seasoned armchair detective has no need for in-depth clueing to figure out what exactly is happening, because the biggest accomplish of Adrift is finding a modern, updated garb for an age-old trick. A trick that needed a more experienced hand to have pulled it off more convincingly.

I know all of this sounds like Adrift was a bit of a letdown, but quite enjoyed this diamond-in-the-rough with some interesting and promising aspects. I also found it very promising Browning leaned much more towards the traditional detective story than the modern crime novel. A good example are the fuzzy details surrounding the body Mer discovers at a seedy motel, which is not as important to the plot as the ghostly activities and impossibilities surrounding the shipwreck. 

Adrift is a spirited first attempt to find a balance between characterization and plot and the classic and modern style of the genre. So readers of my blog are advised not to expect a modern incarnation of the Golden Age detective novel, but it's a fast, enjoyable and promising read with some excellently written diving scenes – reminiscent of Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942) and Forsyte's Diving Death. Browning is very much a writer to keep an eye on because she might turn out to one of us (we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us). Interestingly, the last chapter of Adrift sets up its sequel, Beached (2018), which takes a plunge into the watery world of nautical archaeology. You can expect a review of that one sometime in the not so distant future and, hopefully, it will confirm that we have another James Scott Byrnside, P. Dieudonné or Robert Innes on our hands.