Dive Deep and Deadly

I'm about half-way through this book, the 2000 debut for Glynn Marsh Alam, which I purchased specifically because the heroine was a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver, who'd like to write mysteries featuring that skill... so thought I'd check up on what others had written.

So far, I'm enjoying it. It's well written. Establishes the ambience of southern Florida, with its ethnicities, the diving in caverns and caves, and so on.

Here's how the back jacket describes the book:
From the Florida swamp land, where sudden violent death is a fact of nature, comes Luanne Fogarty with a knack for survival and solving murders. Lush with the feel of the wild Florida swamp, Dive Deep and Deadly seethes with danger both above ground and in the treacherous underwater caves. This book is a steamy Southern mystery filled with swamp danger and diving know-how.

Fogarty, a scuba diver, does body recovery for the local police force. She is called in when a trio of teenage divers find a woman's body anchored in one of the caves. As Fogarty investigates, more women's bodies come to light, and she realizes she has a serial killer on her hands.

Crocodile on the Sandbank

Elizabeth Peters (also Barbara Michaels) is one of my favorite mystery writers, although I must confess I haven't liked the latest books in her Amelia Peabody series. For no other reason than I don't care for the Ramses/Nefret dynamic.

But the earlier Elizabeth Peters, and Barbara Michaels, are pretty good. (Peters, aka Barbara Mertz, her real name, in which she actually is an Egyptologist), is in her 70s now, and I think every writer declines in their 70s, especially when they write a novel a year...

But that may seem like I'm dissing Elizabeth Peters, and I'm not, for, as I said, I love her early stuff. In particular, Crocodile on the Sandbank, published in 1975, which introduced the world to Amelia Peabody - now Peters' most popular character and the one whom she writes most of her books about.

It starts out similar to Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit (written in the 1920s) about a woman who is the daughter of an archaeologist, father dies, and she goes off on adventures. (After the first chapter, of course the stories diverge. On a couple of occasions, Peters pays homage to Christie, which is kind of fun.) In Amelia Peabody's case, she comes into a fortune which enables her to travel to Egypt, where she meets Radcliffe Emerson. They spar,they spat, they fall in love. And the mummy walks.

Highly recommended.