Full of intrigue and plot twists, Jon Sealy’s The King Street Affair grabs you in the first chapter and doesn’t let go. The mystery/spy novel develops an increasingly eerie atmosphere as Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reporter Wyatt Brewer stumbles through a web of lies, secrets, and betrayals into a surreal world where nothing is as it seems.
As the novel opens, two events trouble the middle-aged Wyatt. First, he has to write an obituary for Harry Cope, an old college girlfriend’s father—and that calls up haunting memories. Harry had sent the couple on a trip to Spain where Wyatt finds a dead body and steals a small fortune. The second upsetting event is when a mysterious Estonian washes up on Folly Beach during weather when no one should have been out in the ocean. Sensing a story behind the drowning, Wyatt begins investigating whether the victim may have been murdered.
He is encouraged by a woman he has been dating to attend Harry Cope’s funeral. He goes, thinking it might bring closure of some sort. He has never gotten over his feelings for Mary Grace, who dumped him when she learned her father had paid for their trip to Spain and enlisted Wyatt as a courier to the dead man’s apartment. At the funeral, Wyatt is brought face to face with Mary Grace’s mother and a young woman who looks so much like Mary Grace that he knows she must be her daughter. But the bigger question is, could she be his daughter? Mary Grace died in a car accident not that long after they broke up. Could this young woman be the result of his long-ago romance?
Because Wyatt has been carrying around secrets for decades, he is not really surprised when two intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe show up at his house. They ask him to accompany them and answer some questions. He has been looking over his shoulder for years, expecting a moment like this ever since he took the money from the dead man’s apartment. Sealy employs multiple viewpoints to allow readers insight into Bert and Penelope’s agenda.
The intelligence officers elicit Wyatt’s help in uncovering corruption in the U.S. government agency they work for. For years, the officers have been investigating whether someone in their own agency has been issuing false intelligence reports to reap financial benefits. Before long, Wyatt discovers he has stumbled into a world of spies, gangsters, and corrupt officials in the Holy City. No one is safe. No one is who they seem. And the conspiracy and corruption all tie back to Harry Cope and that ill-fated trip to Spain.
Jon Sealy
Jon Sealy is also the author of The Whiskey Baron, The Edge of America and The Merciful. A South Carolina native, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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