Visiting a friend, Felix’s holiday is rudely upset when Owen is murdered and he is left with the evidence that Owen was killed to conceal. Who can he trust? Criminals, police and politicians are all after him, and he doesn’t know the area at all.

There was nothing wrong with the writing, but this story took a while to drawn me in. It has a slow start, with a man arriving on a plane, focusing on all the little irritations of travel, and then going to a bar with a friend, and I had trouble caring. His friend’s murder immediately picked up the pace and it moves straight into high paced action. The action scenes are good, but brief and don’t seem to chain. It is more a series of linked scenes. Camille and Felix aren’t really developed as characters, but we don’t really see enough of them as it is a short story.

And I have no idea why it is called Ghosts on the Sand. There’s no ghosts, no mention of ghosts literally or figuratively, and sand only occurs when they are running down the beach.

The formatting and grammar are good. I have a minor nitpick with the speech punctuation, which is incorrect as it misses fullstops or commas inside the quotes. There’s are also some missing apostrophes e.g. in “Owens door” in the second paragraph of chapter 3. There are also a few typos e.g. “alcohol in is system” “cruelness” instead of cruelty. I was thrown when the book, which is normally told in close third person from Felix’s point of view, shifted to third person omniscient for the first paragraph of chapter 8.

Action fans may enjoy it, but there’s nothing here to really raise it above the average action story.

Update 26th December: The new title of “Foiled” makes a lot more sense than “Ghosts in the sand.”