The Goat Woman of Largo Bay A Novel

The Goat Woman of Largo Bay is the first in a series of amateur detective novels. The hero, Shad, is a bartender in a fishing village in Jamaica, and acts as the unpaid sheriff.#xA0; His employer, Eric Keller, is a jaded American who lost his hotel in a hurricane seven years earlier. The novel#x19;s action starts when Eric and Shad see movement on the island offshore and think it#x19;s a goat.#xA0; But it#x19;s a woman, Simone, who rents the ruins of Eric#x19;s hotel and Eric starts falling for her.#xA0; She attracts the attention of the villagers.#xA0; A couple shady characters #x1C;visit#x1D; her one night, but she fires her gun and scares them off.#xA0; Shad visits the obeah man (the village magician) and gets a potion that she uses to protect herself further. Simone#x19;s brother Cameron arrives and tells them she recently lost her only child.#xA0; A former Penitentiary friend, Dollar, asks Shad, a thoroughly reformed outlaw, to report on the villagers#x19; political opinions.#xA0; He works for an American businessman connected to the corrupt government. Simone starts celebrating her dead daughter with nightly ceremonies, and Shad learns that her former visitors are working for Dollar and plan to harm her. #xA0;Shad, Eric, Cameron and the obeah man protect her, and the obeah man causes her daughter#x19;s ashes to fall into the sea.#xA0; The intruders confess that they are working for Dollar and planning to manipulate the election in the community. Although Simone chooses to stay on the island, a severe storm destroys her shelter and she returns to the village.#xA0; The businessman is exposed in the press and Shad realizes that he will live to see Dollar another day.

Gillian Royes is the creator of the Shad series, detective novels that take place on the North Coast of Jamaica. The first in the series, The Goat Woman of Largo Bay, appeared in 2011; the second, The Man Who Turned Both Cheeks, in 2012; and most recently, The Sea Grape Tree, in 2014. Prior to that she authored two nonfiction works entitled Business Is Good (1997) and Sexcess: The New Gender Rules at Work (2003). A native of Jamaica, Gillian pursued her higher education in the United States, obtaining a doctorate from Emory University in 1979. She currently lives in Atlanta and on the island of St. Croix, where she lectures at the University of the Virgin Islands. Find out more at GillianRoyes.com.