This new crime novel by Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, native Kennedy Weible is one of those books that makes me wish I took notes. Dirty Myrtle just has much going on! So many characters! It might have been easier to keep them straight if I hadn’t been laughing so hard.

As the story starts out, Myrtle Beach resident Sailor Cassidy wakes up with a terrible hangover and a strange woman in her bed. Was this a rebound hookup after a bad break-up? She suspects so. There’s not much time to reflect on her choice of partners, though, because a conversation with Sailor’s older sister, Carrie, reveals a much more serious problem.

Carrie’s husband Morgan is having an affair. She wants a divorce, but her lawyer raises the difficulty that she’ll need proof. Hiring an expensive private detective is how he recommends she get that evidence, but Sailor says she’ll get it for free.

Carrie’s reaction will make you suspect Sailor’s schemes have a history of not working out quite the way she expects. Which doesn’t begin to describe the mayhem she becomes embroiled in, as she heads off into the night with a borrowed camera and only the vaguest outline of a ‘plan.’

She knows the extracurricular woman’s name: Nina Capaldi. And where she lives. But not key details like who’s paying for her apartment or providing her snazzy sports car. Details Sailor ignores. Details that turn out to be important. One thing you can definitely say about Sailor is, she’s unstoppable. No half measures.

The tight-knit circle around Sailor includes not just her siblings but a group of friends whose relationships go way, way back. Their names have about them that distinctive Southern serendipity: there’s Tayto; Tusk, a police officer whose full name is Tuscaloosa, the town in Alabama where his father was born; Jug, just returned from a several-year voluntary disappearance after an acquaintance was shot in a drug-robbery-gone-wrong (is there any other kind?); JP, a fledgling podcaster, inebriated stand-up comic, and Carrie and Sailor’s older brother; and Dex, or Dexter, their younger brother who has the only ‘ever heard before’ name in the bunch, even if a slightly dodgy nickname.

They aren’t just memorable names, several of them are truly engaging characters, well fleshed out and always intriguing. Some of the characters are clever, and some are definitely not playing with a full deck. Their favourite place to rendezvous is, naturally, the bar called Big Lock’s. I particularly liked the intrepid Sailor and Tusk, a policeman actually trying to keep his head above water in the midst of relentless interpersonal chaos.

Real estate deals gone south, drug deals that started as a bad idea and only got worse, money changing hands into the wrong hands, kidnapping, a murder that didn’t happen and another that did. Flying through these pages is like careening around the twists and turns of a mountain highway with bad brakes.

Bad breaks too. When Carrie is kidnapped as part of a financial scheme too complicated to deconstruct, her dysfunctional family kicks into high gear. Friends and family members keep tripping over each other and their secrets and their schemes while engaged in a chaotic search not just for Carrie, and not just for Nina, but for the life they believe they should have.

Myrtle Beach earned its nickname from its wild and crazy history as a destination for college students on spring break. Non-stop parties and rowdy weekends. There’s no denying that the party atmosphere prevails. You may wonder when this crowd is going to get serious. They’d best not take as their model Hector Simpatico, a private investor who funded so much local development through Grand Strand Bank that he has his own office right in the bank building. You’d take him for someone who’s acquired some gravitas, but he’s the most reprehensible of the lot.

Weible has a great sense of the set-up for all these shenanigans and snappy dialog to boot. A few authentic bad guys ground the action are a reminder that it isn’t all fun and games. It’s perhaps the sheer obliviousness of fun-loving characters like Sailor that actually keeps them safe. If ever a book deserved to be described as a ‘beach read,’ you’ve found it.

Also try: Palm Beach, Finland, by Antti Tuomainen or Summerhouse by Yiğit Karaahmet.

Apprentice House
Print/Kindle/iBook
£20.20

CFL Rating: 4 Stars