Mr Stuart Leland Rider

Jenna's Coin: Book One of the Island Fever Series Mr Stuart Leland Rider

Barbados 1956 Jenna White, thirty five, is a successful New York attorney. Overworked, frustrated, unfulfilled, and tired to the bone, she flies off to Barbados for a much needed break. Totally unaware that she will be caught up in a series of disastrous events resulting in greed, death, and the discovery of the love of her life, she starts to unwind. Enjoying herself for the first time in a decade, Jenna meets and spends time with a variety of attractive men; Ellis, a rich American playboy, Norman, a handsome Aussie derelict, and Quincy, a British charter boat captain. On a water skiing trip, Jenna unearths an old coin on Sandy Lane Beach. It turns out to be an old Spanish Doubloon, one of the infamous Pieces of Eight so often mentioned in connection with pirates of old who frequented the island hundreds of years ago. Innocently showing the coin to her new found water skiing friends at the beach bar, Jenna sets off an explosive chain of events that finds her group of water skiers setting out to locate a long lost treasure. Norman conspires with a crooked cop, ex SAS Sergeant Smythe-Caulley, to steal the treasure when it is found. Into the mix charges Quincy, also ex SAS, and the nemesis of Smythe-Caulley. He sweeps Jenna off her feet and champions her search. Greed quickly leads to murder when the small group finds a rotting chest of gold coins on the reef off Sandy Lane Beach. The confrontation between Jenna and Quincy, the hapless bystanders, and the murderous and vengeful Smythe-Caulley, culminates in a deadly showdown at the abandoned, but still elegant, Farley Hill Plantation House. Stuart Leland Rider lived in the tropics from 1946 to 1960. He spent most of those years, on and off, living on the island of Barbados.