Dan’s girlfriend Martina was raised by her aunt and uncle. Dan and Tom stop to speak with the uncle, Phil Karras, thinking he might have been one of the victims of the scheme. On their arrival, they discover that Phil has just shot and killed his wife who was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.

Dan begins to investigate the scam. He discovers Victor Trebuchet’s real identity and determines that a British earl’s heir helped set up Trebuchet’s fraudulent persona.

Meanwhile, undersea discoveries by two shady brothers could threaten the secrets behind the death and burial of an arch-criminal, and Dan is facing the bar exam.

Sea of Bones is the sequel to , which laid the groundwork for this one. Both books have many characters in common, and some of the events in the first novel have continuing ramifications. It’s not essential to have read the first to understand this second, but it provides some useful background information.

This second book has a more complex plot than the first. As Dan goes about his investigation, he devises a scheme to cheat the cheater. This is not a whodunit – the reader knows all along that Trebuchet is the mastermind behind the Ponzi scheme. The focus of the story is on how Dan is maneuvering Trebuchet into returning the bilked funds.

As in the first book, narrator Dan Shaw continues to be something of a mystery. A certain distance remains between narrator and reader. Dan doesn’t come across as a warm, gregarious person, and at time his behavior can seem morally questionable. His relationship with Martina lacks depth that could signal her disappearance in future books.

From a professional standpoint, I can’t help wondering if the author has deliberately made Dan Shaw a poor researcher or if it was inadvertent. Dan researches the British aristocracy to determine the relative ranking of an earl ... and gets it precisely backwards. Moreover, he wonders if Shakespeare and company were ever in a quaint inn built in the mid-sixteen hundreds ... when Shakespeare died in 1616. Once he’s admitted to the bar, Dan should regularly avail himself of the services of a law librarian, or he may find himself facing a legal malpractice suit for failure to do adequate research!

The clever plot that traps Trebuchet is the best reason for reading Sea of Bones, but it doesn’t raise it above a three-star acceptable rating.

--Lesley Dunlap