VETERANS KEY by Richard Bareford – WWI, Mystery, Historical, Thriller, Florida Keys, Political Intrigue

Veterans Key opens in 1935 as hundreds of derelict vets of the Great War are working in ramshackle government relief camps bridging a gap in the Overseas Highway connecting Key West with the mainland.

One hot August morning, two striking co-eds, Cindy and Ella, step off a train in Islamorada to be greeted with the crude cat-calls of beery veterans. What happens next is unexpected. Cindy singles out Fred, a soft-spoken, muscular vet drinking a Coke. He offers her a sip. She accepts, flirts, and invites him to her hotel in Key West for an amorous rendezvous.

Dealing love and betrayal in equal measure, the protagonists of Veterans Key embark on a course of events that will keep readers guessing.

Eager to meet Cindy, Fred has no inkling that he has in fact been chosen to participate in a carefully planned bank robbery in Havana, the results of which will have enormous consequences for everyone involved. But this pivotal event is barely an introduction to the riveting mystery that is Veterans Key, a serio-comic novel with moments of pathos, terror, and more twists and turns than a cottonmouth snake.

With fate and family tied together and wrapped tight in a web, Richard Bareford ensnares readers in this original story where nobody is quite who they seem.

Cindy’s brother Emilio is a Cuban revolutionary intent on avenging his torture by deposed General Machado’s secret police. Cindy’s father is a former official of the target bank and his knowledge of the contents of a certain safe deposit box is critical for the heist. Fred’s role is to play the patsy in the robbery and the investigation that will surely follow.

If everything had gone to plan, Fred would take the fall, while Emilio and the girls escape with the money, but in this highly original, picaresque novel, nothing goes to plan.

As the story unfolds, the characters’ various involvements with good guys and thugs, including the Cuban police, American FBI agents, Communists, Nazi spies, and mobsters from the Meyer Lansky gang make for a rich mix of deceptions, lies and misdirection. Ultimately Ella may be the most complex figure of them all, a 17-year-old German Jew living an impossible balancing act.

Bareford creates a vivid and compelling adventure by weaving the historical with the plausible.

The disdain of camp officials for the men in their charge and the devastating aftermath of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane adds gravitas to the deceptively light tone throughout much of the book.

Veterans Key evokes other distinctive novels including The Horse’s Mouth and A Confederacy of Dunces, not for their story lines but for the originality of their thinking. Readers may appreciate the nods to Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. There is no “predictable” here, only the sheer joy of an original work that commands your attention on its own terms. Highly recommended!