Slipknot

Jane Bunker, a Florida detective with an affinity for scotch and sarcasm, grows ”tired of drug runners with fast boats and Haitians on inner tubes” and heads to Maine to become a marine investigator for an insurance firm. Then a corpse washes up. Despite the occasional overindulgence in simile (”my goose bumps melted like butter thrown onto a hot griddle”), Greenlaw, author of nonfiction best-sellers such as The Lobster Chronicles, has no trouble finding her sea legs in a new genre. In Slipknot, the first book in an intended series, she tantalizingly leaves mysteries about Jane’s own past unanswered in this swiftly paced yarn. B+