Setting: US Virgin Islands
Time Period: Modern Day

“Crystal Blue” by John H. Cunningham is an action adventure novel about a pilot who helps a concert promoter with a show in the US Virgin Islands. But before Buck even has a chance to fly the husband and wife team out of Key West to the islands, the husband turns up missing and one of the entertainers held for ransom. Instead of cancelling the concert, Buck is determined to help find out who is behind this and get the missing people back – alive.

I’ve learned that when you read the “action and adventure” genre from a male author in the mainstream market, the wording is going to be very casual and use a lot of slang. It was definitely like that in “Crystal Blue,” but I still enjoyed the novel. The plot was very interesting and ended up having a pretty serious theme about adoption vs. abortion and the fight against the women’s choice movement. The author used this story line to bring up an important question – why don’t we lower the cost of adoption and make abortion not the norm? By carrying out the plot of some mysterious, powerful person threatening to cause harm to the concert attendees in the novel, a deeper question was brought out not only in the story, but food for thought in real life too – is the whole thing political? Some hard questions are raised in this book! Yet, woven in between the deep issues of life was a bit of comedy, quirky characters and action.

Conclusion: This was an interesting book. It had some language in it, but otherwise, was fairly clean. There was one scene that could have been questionable, but the one character didn’t let it go anywhere, so I won’t be too hard on it. This book is #3 in a series and I’m not sure I’d continue reading the other books, but that’s due to the genre and writing style, not really anything wrong with the author or book/s themselves.