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Under Pressure

by Kathy Brandt

Kathy Brandt returns to the murder-mystery field with her fourth novel, Under Pressure, featuring Detective Hannah Samson, a police diver currently located in Tortola, part of the British Virgin Islands. The story is fine until the reader gets close to the end, where he/she may feel a little cheated when the entire focus of the investigation is abruptly dismissed. Not that being taken 'down the garden path' is anything new to the mystery author! I do feel, however, that the novel might have given us a couple of hints to ameliorate such a sudden shift. Also, Chapter One introduces us (without naming them) to two characters who follow their prey in an airport. We're not informed of who the two characters are until Chapter Thirty, but I doubt that if indeed one of the two was as famous as suggested, there was no way that individual wouldn't be noticed by someone, regardless of how dressed. OK, so I'm picky!

Hannah and her new protégé, Jimmy Snyder, are on the police boat and almost ready for her to continue to teaching him all the things he might encounter during an underwater crime scene when a small plane that has just taken off from the nearby airport plunges into the sea right in front of them. Both immediately dive down and rescue all who aren't already dead from the impact.

There were originally ten on board, with a total capacity for fifteen. Jimmy and Hannah rescued eight, but the co-pilot was also already dead, leaving seven passengers still alive. One was a nine-year-old boy found in the plane's restroom at the rear, desperately fighting for breath in the ever-decreasing air bubble there. Hannah suspects the plane was somehow sabotaged and someone on board was targeted. Her boss, Chief Dunn, thinks otherwise and leans toward the accident theory.

The plot variously brings in a senator's wife, a red-headed, wealthy female lawyer, a male movie star and his agent, all of them initially on board the doomed plane; then other members of the police force, an airplane mechanic, an avid environmentalist, and the senator himself. Plus a couple of kilos of coke and a gun are found on the submerged aircraft in a later dive for luggage and whatever evidence can be discovered. Meanwhile Hannah argues with her boyfriend, and eventually finds herself taking care of the young boy, Simon, whose father had been one of the casualties in the plane wreck. She surprises herself by enjoying the sudden responsibility.

The final pages of the novel naturally present us with a surprise, besides adding in a major hurricane with Hannah aboard the perpetrators' boat, watching her own craft (and home) completely destroyed. After a harrowing escape, this is followed by Hannah and Simon being chased by a killer during the full force of the hurricane. A good mystery, especially for anyone who loves the water, and anything associated with it. With the one exception mentioned above, Kathy Brandt writes a story that obliges you to keep turning pages until the end.

Alan Paul Curtis

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