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.
Nick Sweeney is a freelance writer and musician living on the English
coast. His fascination with East European history and culture will
become apparent to readers of A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved.
Nick's other books include the Poland-set Laikonik Express and The
Exploding Elephant.
