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Zusatztext [Royes] does an outstanding job of creating a small Jamaican village – it is so vivid that the reader feels part of the environment – and deftly shows the social and political life on the island. The novel is an absorbing read and one that won’t be forgotten quickly. –Barbara Cothern! Portland Book Review Informationen zum Autor 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 is The Goat Woman of Largo Bay , followed by The Man Who Turned Both Cheeks , The Sea Grape Tree , and The Rhythm of the August Rain . Prior to that she authored two nonfiction works entitled Business Is Good and Sexcess: The New Gender Rules at Work . She has also ventured into scriptwriting with Preciosa , a film directed by Peter Sagnia, as well as a play called How to Be an Immigrant . A native of Jamaica, Gillian pursued her higher education in the United States, obtaining a doctorate from Emory University. 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. Klappentext Royes begins the detective series featuring Shad, a bartender in a fishing village in Jamaica, who is the community problem-solver and right hand of Eric, an American who owns the bar and a hotel left in ruins by a hurricane. 320 pp. 30,000 print. The Goat Woman of Largo Bay CHAPTER ONE At first he thought she was a goat. Staring at the distant spot, Shad decided there was something about goats that had always irritated him. Nobody liked them, even if they were as common to Largo as fishing boats. But they were rude animals— facety, his grandmother used to call them—invading your yard to eat your young tomatoes and glaring when you tried to shoo them away. The thought came only a minute after Eric had shouted his name and Shad had placed the glass he’d been wiping on a shelf and hurried around the counter of the bar. “What happening, boss?” he’d said. “There’s something on the island!” Eric, his T-shirt and shorts flattened by the sea breeze, was pointing toward the tiny offshore island. “I don’t see nothing.” Shad had squinted at the lump of rocks and its lone tree. “Probably just a bird, or a shadow.” “I’m telling you, there’s something out there.” A tall man with the red-brown skin of a northerner who’d been in the tropics too long, Eric was standing statue-still, knees bent, a few feet from the edge of the cliff. Every part of him, the outstretched arm holding a pipe, the swirling white hair, the small paunch even, strained toward the island. Atop the five steps leading down to the grass, Shad had shielded his eyes against the setting sun. Golden-orange, the island looked like a prodigal son sitting a quarter mile offshore. The water that separated it from the cliff was striped turquoise and aqua, long waves rolling toward the shore, forever restless without a protective reef. “I see it,” Shad said. “I told you so,” Eric said, and straightened. “What do you think it is?” “Look like a goat, boss.” Eric agreed, because Shadrack Myers was known in Largo Bay as a smart-man , in the best sense of the term. He might be small and wiry, they said, but he was as bright as any Kingston professor and as wily as Anansi, the spider of the folk tales. The reason for this, according to the old ladies, was that he was born with a high forehead and the blackest skin a man could have. “Who’d put a damn goat out there?” Eric asked. “It only take one renegade to cause confusion,” Shad said. And the renegade knew that Eric wouldn’t...
