Sepiessa Press announces release of Dutch Reckoning, a Tommy Shakespear Mystery Thriller
Author Michael West draws on personal connection to bring the Gardner Museum art theft to life
Martha’s Vineyard, MA (October 28, 2013)
Sepiessa Press announces the publication of Dutch Reckoning, a Tommy Shakespear Mystery Thriller, available in print and digital formats on Amazon and at bookstores on Martha’s Vineyard. Off-island bookstores may order Dutch Reckoning through the Ingram catalog. Dutch Reckoning is a mystery novel in the vein of Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald, featuring an ironic sleuth named Tommy Shakespear. In this book Shakespear tackles the unsolved art theft at the prominent Butler Museum in Boston.
The Beatrice Butler Museum in Boston, Massachusetts houses one of the most renowned art collections in the world. Early one morning, thieves masquerading as cops tied up the security guards and stole thirteen of the Butler Museum’s finest and most valuable paintings — by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, Manet and others.
A reluctant sleuth, Tommy Shakespear leaves behind his surfboard and his mountain bike at the request of his old friend, Jack Butler, and travels from Santa Cruz, California to Boston and Barcelona in search of the elusive gang of thieves responsible for the art theft. Shakespear also leaves behind his budding romance with Shiva, a successful video game developer, and ventures a little too close to the heat of his former flame Elaine, as he dodges bullets and bedroom encounters on his way to solving the mystery of “Who did the Butler?”
Here is what one local reader said about Dutch Reckoning:
“A helluva whodunnit art theft, murder mystery. Plot twists and surprises
kept me turning pages until the end.”
– Thaw Malin III, Martha’s Vineyard landscape artist
Michael G. West, a graduate of Williams College and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, is the author of several novels, including the Tommy Shakespear Mystery Thriller series. He has worked as a dishwasher, short-order cook, housepainter, shingler, sheetrock taper, private tutor, taxi driver, college professor, freelance book editor, computer programmer, industry analyst and strategy consultant in several countries and on both coasts, north and south, in the U.S. Michael West currently lives year round on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Said author West, “In real life, I was a colleague-in-poetry and close friend to the late Isabella ‘Belle’ Gardner, poet, niece and namesake of the woman who, with Bernard Berenson, amassed the amazing art collection housed in the little Florentine palace she built, the Gardner Museum. That personal connection helped fuel my writing of this tale.”