Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved

A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved

Sweeney, Nick

Paperback

Mystery & ThrillerLiterary Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1592110649
ISBN13: 9781592110643
Publisher: Histria Fiction
Published: Nov 15 2020
Pages: 174
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s--a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history, then discarded them.

She is curious about his past life on the Côte d'Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile. Henri dismisses that story; it's an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice--the man, an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe subsumed into the bigger countries around it.

They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes. They are also genocide survivors--a word Henri understands for the first time when he hears them utter it--Armen escaping the Smyrna conflagration in 1922, and Luciana surviving the totalitarian powers that scourged Europe in the Second World War. Both are from places that no longer exist.

Henri's affinity with them becomes friendship, even as their troubles multiply when Luciana falls prey to a wasting disease. When a series of catastrophes robs Henri of his friends and his countess, his days on the Blue Coast are numbered, and soon he is back in his native England, in and out of London's hospitals.

There are signs that his luck has not been all bad: Henri may have salvaged some of the fortune his friends lost, and the narrator feels close to a solution to a final mystery from his time on the Blue Coast when she deduces that he is not as adrift as he seems.

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