On the heels of his highly praised debut novel, SINS OF THE BROTHER, Mike Stewart returns with another southern flavored mystery involving the charming, laid-back attorney, Tom McInnes. In fact, the two novels are closely intertwined, with both storylines revolving around McInnes and his client, Susan Fitzsimmons, whose husband was murdered in SINS. As DOG ISLAND opens, Susan phones McInnes to ask him to help a runaway teenager who thinks she witnessed a murder and is now hiding out in Susan's home. McInnes is reluctant to revisit the Florida panhandle and the personally tragic memories that are still very vivid and painful: the murder of Susan's husband and the loss of his brother. But, of course, he does --- and finds himself representing a problematic young girl running from a troubled past and, now, a pair of cold-blooded killers.

The contrast of the somewhat Pollyanna McInnes and Fitzsimmons with the truly ugly characterizations of the Bodine brothers, their cohorts, and a particularly nasty killer who enjoys torturing victims, is an unsettling jolt to the senses. In part, it's what makes Stewart's mystery unique, even if some of the events seem a bit beyond the realm of believability. As the action moves forward, other bottom feeders enter the picture, creating a convoluted circle of affiliations and rivalries with McInnes, Susan, and the girl caught in the crossfire. Despite their conflicting agendas, smugglers, Cuban revolutionaries, and all the other usual criminal elements seem to have one thing in common --- killing this trio. To say that McInnes and friends are experiencing an unusually rotten week would be a monumental understatement. Before Stewart's ink is even dry on the uneasy reunion of Tom and Susan, Stewart plunges them into life-threatening circumstances and never lets up.

Despite Stewart's succinct style of writing, DOG ISLAND isn't lacking in either complexity or characterizations. McInnes relies heavily on the friend ship and the intimidating physical bulk of his friend Joey, "a former shore patrolman, former Navy Intelligence officer, former Alabama state trooper, and former Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent." In one short paragraph, Stewart conveys to readers all they need to know about Joey: he's a formidable talent with an attitude. His girlfriend, Loutie Blue, is a statuesque ex-stripper who has retired to an elegant old home in Mobile, where they all take temporary refuge. But just like Joey, there's much more to her than meets the eye. As McInnes observes, "Loutie Blue was resourceful and intelligent and, under the right circumstances, a disturbingly dangerous woman."

As if the race to solve a murder and save the teenager wasn't enough to cope with, uncovering the identities of those who are controlling events as they unfold becomes paramount --- for the characters and the reader. What appears on the surface to be a good old-fashioned turf war is actually a much more complicated puzzle of who is doing what to whom and why. In the final scenes, Stewart polishes the storyline off with not one twist but two, leaving readers with some tantalizing, unanswered questions. And those pieces left dangling are actually what make Stewart's novel just that much more interesting, giving us something to mull over until the next McInnes novel --- or beyond.