Henry Wakefield, a stuffy professor with a passing interest in maritime history, contacts Hardy to perform a seemingly innocuous task. He is to meet with prisoner John Twizell, who is possibly linked by blood to the last survivor of the wreck of the HMS Dunbar. Professor Wakefield, in return, promises to pay Hardy handsomely for his time.

Naturally, unforseen difficulties are provided by the rough, gruff, and difficult-to-love Tanner family. As Cliff investigates, he is first threatened and then coerced into helping the Tanners locate a stash of missing money, all the while diving deeper into an increasingly hostile milieu of thugs, cops, and delectable dames.

Corris is clearly at home within the boundaries of crime fiction. The Dunbar Case is easy to read, well plotted, and suggests that, at the age of seventy, Corris can still hold his own in an increasingly crowded genre. The more astute reader is at times left begging for greater detail beyond the perfunctory: sex scenes rarely exceed a single sentence, his female characters seem unnaturally one-dimensional, and, in setting a scene, much gets told that could more effectively have been shown.

The Dunbar Case is an entertaining, if not particularly memorable, entry in the life and times of Cliff Hardy. Fans of Corris may well find more to like, and why not? At thirty-eight novels and counting, he has earned the right to a little give and take.