Book review: “The King Street Affair”

But Wyatt’s fears are not limited to his professional insecurity; in The King Street Affair, the fourth novel by Richmond native Jon Sealy, elements of his past return to plague him.

When the body of an Estonian turns up on Folly Beach in Charleston, Wyatt – who has a personal connection to an old crime – is entrusted with the story.

While studying, he fell in love with Mary Grace Cope, the daughter of the devious judge Harry Cope.

When Wyatt is ordered by the judge to deliver $500,000 to a man in Madrid, he finds the recipient dead and keeps the money.

Later, Mary Grace leaves him and dies in a car accident that probably has nothing to do with the crime.

But when two agents from the Infrastructure Surveillance Division, Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe, make a connection between Wyatt and the Estonian, they interrogate him and learn that he has more money than most experienced journalists.

Espionage, crime and corruption are intertwined in this complex and gripping novel.

Sealy, a South Carolina native, spices up his impressive creativity with varied plot (a threat of betrayal), characterization (a possible genetic connection) and prose (“When he pulled into his neighborhood, it was pitch black and cold outside, a front coming in from the sea and settling over the Lowcountry like a virus in the lungs”).

Sealy’s debut novel, The Whiskey Baron, was about bootlegging. His second novel, The Edge of America, was about the drug trade in South Florida. And his third novel used a fatal hit-and-run accident to explore sin, justice and grace.

A consummate literary artist, he expands his powers in The King Street Affair, a novel with global reach, alarming portraits of government and business, and the resurrected ghosts of the undead past.