It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night. Harry Oakes, a gruff, unlikable character and one of the richest men in the world, was bludgeoned to death in the master bedroom of his bougainvillea-covered villa in the Bahamas. The rain was coming down so hard that a houseguest sleeping two rooms away said he didn’t hear a thing.
“The victim’s skull bore four puncture marks above his left ear, and his face was smeared with blood,” Charlotte Gray writes in “Murdered Midas: A Millionaire, His Gold Mine, and a Strange Death on an Island Paradise,” her comprehensive, readable and resolutely nonsensationalist account of Oakes’s rise and sudden fall. “There were bloodstains on the wall, and rusty drops and pools of dried blood on the carpet. On the night table next to the bed, a set of false teeth sat in glass of water.”
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