Professional golfer and newly initiated golf course designer Alan Saxon is on his way to the beautiful island of Bermuda for a combination of work and pleasure. His days will be filled with long strolls on a beautiful new resort hotel golf course, his nights with island romance? Well, maybe not. He has decided to take his daughter, Lynette, along for a short holiday between her terms at Oxford. His plan is for them to spend some quality time together. But Lynette has other plans. She requests the company of a friend, Jessica Hadley, who is a little more impulsive and fun-loving than she. Jessica displays her precocious personality just as soon as she gets on the plane and continues to cause unwanted grief by making an official complaint about their taxi driver, Mo, when she reaches their hotel.

The next day, as Alan and his partner Peter Fullard overview the course they're designing, Peter confides his fears that someone is trying to sabotage their progress in completing the course. Although Alan is skeptical, when he finds the dead body of Mo, the taxi driver, swinging from a tree on the course later that night, he begins to think Peter isn't so far off.

Although his working holiday is enlivened by an encounter with the beautiful, leggy ex-journalist Nancy Wykoff, he finds on returning to his room after spending the night with her that his answering machine is blinking with an ominous message--his daughter and her friend have been kidnapped during his one brief, sexy interlude.

Wracked with guilt, he calls his ex-wife Rosemary. Her arrival and the arrival of Jessica Hadley's rude, demanding father increase the complications in his life and his investigation into Mo's murder and Lynette and Jessica's kidnapping. As he begins to make progress, he finds himself a target, wondering who to trust and less able to move freely forward with his inquiries.

Bermuda Grass is a well-written mystery that keeps the reader engaged throughout. Keith Miles, aka Edward Marston, has plenty of experience entertaining readers with his various series, and this is the third Alan Saxon mystery. I'm most familiar with his reformation series featuring Nick Bracewell, which is informative, fun, and very entertaining. Although most of my experience with golf is reminding my husband to clean the mud off his spikes when he drags them home from a game, I was quite pleased to be introduced to this series and the escapades of Alan Saxon. Aside from a bit of somewhat stagey dialogue, I enjoyed the reading, which allowed me the fantasy experience of staying at a beautiful luxury resort at a location I can only dream of visiting. I felt Alan's frustration at his confinement in the face of his daughter's kidnapping and his mixed pleasure and reserve in dealing with the various women in his life. Golf took a back seat in this story, serving only as a backdrop for the multiple complications and well-defined characters in Alan's life. Bermuda Grass is a nice afternoon's read, especially in the dead of winter, when a trek on the golf course would be a welcome relief.