Spiraling from the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. A gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, it is at once gritty and hedonistic, beautiful and complex.

Boston comic Mark Winslow arrives with his troupe of improv actors ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region—seared by drought and caught in the culture war—are anything but peaceful this summer. Does the tall ship in the harbor bear an unusually large number of Scandinavian tourists? If not, who are the blond and ragged people insisting they are associated with it?

Then a public fight makes Mark the prime suspect in the grisly butchering of a Boston blueblood. Mark believes his choice is simple: find the killer or be charged with the crime.

Amid the clam shacks and craft shops, art galleries and nude beaches, undercurrents are pulling at the surface of normality, like riptides beneath seemingly calm water. Could the disappearance of a famous painter 80 years in the past—and the story of his masterpiece, The Fisher Boy—somehow lie at the center of the whirlpool of evil threatening to extinguish Mark’s life? The Fisher Boy is Stephen Anable’s debut novel.

Reviews

Like Provincetown itself, THE FISHER BOY (Poisoned Pen, $24.95), a first novel by Stephen Anable set in this resort town on Cape Cod, is gaudy and gay — and way over the top. It’s not enough that the place has been invaded by a militaristic evangelical sect. The streets are also crawling with menacing children from a cult that grows amazing fruit and vegetables and models itself on ancient Nordic culture....Anable has given his earnest sleuth a genuine sense of wonder at the beauty of the Cape and a rare ability to hold conversations with sad, wounded people. His is a voice worth hearing again. -- Marilyn Stasio, New York Times, May 18 2008