Publication Date: June 9, 2026
A few days before Thanksgiving, Sailor Cassidy is running an amateur stakeout she has no business conducting. She’s nursing a bad breakup, following a plan that’s half-baked in more ways than one, and reckless enough not to care. What could go wrong?
Across town, Officer Tuscaloosa “Tusk” Knight is working an off-the-books job for his captain, tailing a drifter who, it turns out, once sat two rows over from him in high school English. It’s not exactly the glamorous step toward promotion he pictured, but it beats paperwork.
When Sailor’s disaster and Tusk’s assignment collide, the two stumble into a life-or-death mess involving kidnapping, half-wit criminals, and a tangle of small-town secrets longer than the Carolina coast. With the clock ticking, Sailor and Tusk are left trying to separate the truth from the lies, and the lies from the truly stupid decisions.
Myrtle Beach is the setting for Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible. It’s a mystery with family dysfunction, inept bad guys, and too many crazy crimes to count!
Sailor does surveillance on her sister’s cheating husband, and she has no idea where it will lead. There’s a lot of tension, injuries, crimes, and criminal intent that always seem to be just on the surface without any depth or details revealed. But once the meat of the story is reached, we are taken on a merry ride.
Sailor’s entire family, along with some friends, are in deep. Will they survive and help take down the bad guys? At times, I felt like I was in an Abbott and Costello episode. There were even some laugh-out-loud moments along with the cringeworthy ones as they tried to stay out of the line of fire. With most criminals getting what they deserved, the story ended abruptly, leaving a few loose ends. I could see another book showing us what the supposed good guys are up to, along with the changes Sailor hopes to make in her life.
Dirty Myrtle could have several meanings as multiple crimes are committed and Sailor and her family assists the police in bringing the bad guys down.
Kennedy Weible was born and raised in Myrtle Beach, SC. His short stories have appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review and Hanging Loose Magazine among others. He is the author of the novels Number One Loser and Prophet of Loss, the short story collections, How You’re Not Funny and Hello From Out Here, and the children’s book Bed Critters. His humor essays have appeared in Men’s Health and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and son.
