Tabloid Circus

“With Tabloid Circus, Kent Harrington joins the elite group of American authors.”

-Daniel Marrois, Huffington Post

The world’s press has landed on the small Caribbean island of Tortola to report the disappearance of American college student Mary Waters. Among the crowd of journalists is 33-year-old Stanley Jones, on his last chance as a reporter for the Royal, a London tabloid. Stanley’s editors have told him to focus on finding Mary’s killer, looking for a lurid story about an innocent blonde ravaged by a local.

The real investigation is in the hands of the island’s police chief, Lawrence O’Conner, a Tortola native who resists the FBI’s offer of help even as he wonders whether his department can handle the global scrutiny. The media pressure weighs heavy on the island’s prime minister, who fears a Grenada-type intervention, and Lawrence knows it’s a matter of days before he must accept the FBI’s assistance.

Stanley meets another American girl, Colleen Thompson, who is as lost as Mary Waters, but in a different way: unhappy, hard-drinking, promiscuous. Stanley, fighting his own alcoholism, sees a kindred spirit in Colleen, and hires her to help him with gossip and local color.
Everyone involved in the Waters investigation and its coverage has an agenda, large or small. Regardless of what really happened to Mary Waters, the search for her and her attackers becomes an opportunity to shift the balance of economic and political power, not only on the island but throughout the region. As Stanley and Lawrence investigate the Waters disappearance on separate tracks, they become unlikely allies, treading carefully among questions of race, economic disparity, the legacy of colonialism and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. What they ultimately discover is that, despite political complications and technological advances, the central and hardest human mysteries — love, violence, redemption — never change