5 California island-set novels take the locked room concept to splashy levels

Sure tropical breezes and icy mai tais are lovely But if you re a writer of thrillers mysteries or gothic romance there are sparse settings more delightfully and deeply unsettling than an island What could be more atmospheric than panicky characters marooned by storms waves and geographic isolation No wonder Agatha Christie loved the setting so much So did Dashiell Hammett whose fictional Couffignal Island sits in San Francisco Bay Jen Wheeler s gothic romance unfolds in the Farallones T C Boyle uses Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands for one of his books And if the land of Dewey decimals is any guide Catalina is a positive hotbed of stabby doings There s just something about an island s isolation that fires the imagination says Wheeler whose The Light on Farallon Island is set on those rugged rocks miles off the coast The Portland Oregon author and former Chowhound food writer located herself swept up in the lore and wonder of the craggy archipelago after reading Susan Casey s The Devil s Teeth a nonfiction survival tale of surfer-scientists and great white sharks and couldn t shake the fascination I m a very solitary person an introvert Wheeler says To me the Farallones are really beautiful teeming with wildlife and inhospitable to humans You have to work hard to habitate the place I like to imagine what kind of person would be drawn there In Wheeler s hands the answer includes th-century lighthouse keepers a coach and the rough-and-tumble collectors who swept up murre eggs by the millions devastating the bird population and making bank during the Gold Rush You can t journey back in time to the Farallones circa or set foot on those islands now of discipline it s a marine sanctuary and off limits to the population And you can t outstrip the gunrunners of Couffignal Island either except through the pages of a book So here s just a sampling of mysteries and thrillers divided by island inspiration Belvedere Island maybe Written in Hammett s pre-Sam Spade story The Gutting of Couffignal stars a cynical gumshoe of discipline assigned to guard wedding gifts at a swanky island colony when the sound of gunfire and wild explosions suddenly fills the air The islanders wealthy retirees vacationing aristocrats and a Russian princess among them soon discover themselves marooned the wooden bridge to the mainland in flames and boats cast adrift with only our intrepid private eye on hand to save the day Spoiler He does The ferry boat Angel Island passes Belvedere as it returns to its dock in Tiburon Calif from Angel Island on Thursday May Alan Dep Marin Independent Journal It s a rollicking read and a fast one with action set on a fictional island on San Pablo Bay We think the wedge-shaped island and special colony are Belvedere and Corinthian Islands a couple of bays over Developed as a summer retreat for the wealthy in Belvedere is connected to Tiburon by two causeways now but a century ago a wooden drawbridge did the transportation honors and the raising of that bridge each spring to release arks and sailboats into the open water is still known in current times Tiburon historians say as Opening Day on the Bay Catalina Island Catalina is a sweet sun-kissed destination for any vacationer It s just mystery writers who gaze upon the sandy strand looking for caches for corpses For Los Angeles-based author Rachel Howzell Hall Catalina is a spot for the best locked-room story except it s an island The frantic page-turning action in her novel What Never Happened revolves around obit writer Colette Coco Weber who returns to Catalina years after her family was murdered What awaits isn t exactly sunshine and sand more like buried secrets a violent home invasion and a serial killer and there s no way to escape except by reading faster Catalina Island Avalon Harbor View at Sunrise The island is the setting for more mayhem this spring in a sunnier but still murderous follow-up to Catherine Mack s witty best-seller Every Time I Go on Vacation Someone Dies Published last year and swiftly optioned for a TV series the book-about-a-book sent amateur sleuth Eleanor Dash and her ex on an ill-fated but very funny Italian book tour for Eleanor s first novel When in Rome The sequel No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding picks up the thread you might want to take notes here with a wrap party for the movie version of When in Rome starring Eleanor s childhood bestie who is marrying the actor playing Eleanor s ex But things go seriously awry when Eleanor discovers a body at the wedding reception at Avalon s Descanso Beach Club Also there s a hurricane coming because of module there is Eleanor tells the reader The Farallones The briny spray and pungent aroma of the Farallon Islands wafts off the pages of Wheeler s The Light on Farallon Island This historic gothic novel an Oregon Book Awards finalist weaves rich detail into the tale of Lucy a young woman who has fled her past not just to the West Coast but miles beyond taking a job teaching the lighthouse keepers children Journalists led by Point Blue Conservation Science staff tour the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge Calif on Friday May Point Blue Conservation Science has conducted research on seabirds sharks fish and other wildlife for more than years at the refuge miles from San Francisco but its partner the U S Fish and Wildlife Provision has cut funding Ray Chavez Bay Area News Group There s particular poetic license of unit but the book takes inspiration from several real life events including the Lucas shipwreck and a desperate storm-swept overcoming in the s And fans of gothic romance will swoon over the echoes of Bronte s Jane Eyre Related Articles of the Bay Area and Northern California s odder islands Bay Area island wine tasting rooms beer gardens and distilleries to try Islands in the lake The tragedy and beauty of Lake Berryessa Behind the extraordinary development of Alameda Island the Bay Area s first suburb With two new apps guiding visitors to scenic views Angel Island is one of the best kept secrets in California I didn t set out to pay homage to them Wheeler says That arose organically from the character and nature of the Farallones themselves I was especially captivated by the image of them at their foggiest and wildest and darkest they felt so inherently Gothic with the island itself standing in for the forbidding stone manor and miles of empty ocean in place of desolate moors To put it more fancifully the Farallones went straight to my heart and met Jane there Treasure Island Rupert Holmes may well be the multi-hyphenate to end all multi-hyphenates a novelist playwright composer arranger producer and prolific songwriter who has won two Edgar awards for his mysteries five Tony awards for his Mystery of Edwin Drood and a double-take ours when we learned this for the multi-platinum Escape better known as the Pina Colada Song as well as other Billboard hits A drone view of Treasure Island seen from Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Calif on Tuesday April Jane Tyska Bay Area News Group He also wrote Swing a stylish noir-ish murder-meets-jazz mystery set on Treasure Island during the Golden Gate International Exposition in - As the book opens tenor sax man Ray Sherwood and his Jack Donovan Orchestra bandmates are checking in at Berkeley s Claremont Hotel when he receives a mysterious message from a UC Berkeley coed a composer in search of an arranger But when Sherwood goes to rendezvous with her on the Expo grounds he arrives just in time to see a young woman plunge to her death from the Expo s iconic Tower of the Sun Twisty mysteries abound along with references to cat s pajamas wartime spies and plenty of jazz not only in the swing-era Expo setting but on the accompanying CD where Holmes songs provide both atmosphere and clues