"Dead Man's Island" and other marooned mysteries

I've just finished a Ken Follett book, "Whiteout". It's one of those stories in which a group of people is marooned in a country home because of a prolonged blizzard. This is more of a thriller than a mystery, and I'll write about it in another post.

It did remind me, though, of this tried and true formula for mystery suspense novels. I suppose the granddaddy of them all was Agatha Christie's "10 Little Indians". Ten murder suspects are all cooped up in a castle — I think it was on an island but it's such a long time since I read it that I don't quite remember. Anyway, they all kept getting bumped off one by one and the trick was to guess who the murderer was before the last one fell. Nobody does this kind of thing quite like Agatha, but some others have come close. One is Carolyn Hart.

Ms Hart has two mystery series, one starring Annie and Max Darling, and the other Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins—affectionately known as Henrie O. "Dead Man's Island" stars Henrie O. It was published in 1993.

She is a retired newspaper reporter who has travelled around the world in that work. Now she's in her sixties, and her talents have made her into an intrepid amateur detective. I like her feisty personality, and the fact that some sad episodes in her past life have helped shape it. Like most heroines of detective fiction, she can be a bit over the top, but the author helps us suspend our disbelief very nicely.

In "Dead Man's island", Henrie O has been invited by an old lover, now an arrogant media magnate and obscenely rich, to come to his private island and find out who has been trying to kill him. On the island, of course, there is a selection of people with reasons to kill him (why do these people surround themselves with people who hate them?) and much jealousy and tension among the group.

Add to this the fact that the island is in the path of a deadly hurricane, and you've got all the ingredients for a great read for detective fiction fans like us. The descriptions of the hurricane and what they all have to do to survive (and of course they don't all survive) are well done, and of course Henrie O can't just think of escaping the wind and the waves because the murderer is still at large. Oh this is pure escapist fare!

Has anyone else read "Dead Man's Island"? What do you think of Henrie O? Or have you read anything else by Carolyn Hart, or any other "marooned" type mysteries?

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