Marie Vincente de la Croix practices white magic voodoo on the small island of St. Margaret in the West Indies, a five square mile island “where the Anglican Church still reigned supreme.” Thus, business was tough; but she was “cleansing” her best client in the ocean waters in a fertility ceremony when she witnesses the son of the reigning Van Biers family orchestrate the killing of a man on the beach. Because they were almost totally immersed, only Mayte Van Biers by telescope from afar, saw that there were witnesses to her stepson Charles’ brutal killing of the art expert who had come to appraise her husband Simons’s Van Gogh painting.

The painting is the cornerstone of the bank that Simon Van Biers has founded as part of a Ponzi scheme. Time is running out for the scheme - the FBI is sniffing around and the US has dispatched SEC investigators. The protection afforded him by the island’s President is not going to last much longer, and his clever, wicked wife Mayte is already hedging her bets by having an affair with the President.

Billy Blue is a rodeo-man, who believes in sleeping only with married women who cannot lay claim to him. When he misjudges the intelligence of the husband of one of his paramours and is caught, the resulting beating ends his rodeo days. Propitiously, Billy learns from his grandmother, at her deathbed, of the existence of a Van Gogh that is being held by his natural father, who has changed his name and is now the powerful Simon Van Biers. Billy traces Simon, and boards the same plane to St. Margaret as Zoe Marton.

Zoe is the Van Gogh expert at Sotheby’s and has resigned to take a job as the curator for Simon’s art collection - a collection that includes a Van Gogh that belonged to her family. Zoe’s hidden agenda is to retrieve her family’s Van Gogh. If you are counting, you now know that there are two Van Goghs, and that Simon has both and intends to keep them.

Hoodwinked comes off almost as if it were one great spoof of a mystery novel, and, if read that way, is highly entertaining. However, if it is meant to be a serious search for the Van Gogh(s), the outlandish, over-the-top characters and their witty dialogue tend to undermine the novel’s dramatic tension. By the same token it is hard to take the budding romance between Billy Blue and Zoe seriously.

As one caper follows another, one can applaud R. J. Kaiser’s originality.

--Thea Davis