SMILE BEACH MURDER

An out-of-work reporter probes a death the police have written off.

Mass layoffs at the Charlotte Times hit Callie Padget hard. Once she can no longer afford her big-city apartment, her childhood home on Cattail Island seems as good a place as any to escape. Not that there’s much of her family there. Her father left before she was born, and her mother died when she was 12. Her Uncle Hudson is a cantankerous old coot, but he’s kept her old bedroom in his loft waiting for her. Hudson prods Callie into working part time for Antoinette Redfield at MotherVine bookshop, where she encounters Eva Meeks, who runs Meeks Hardware with her sister, Georgia. Eva, who’s all atwitter with hopes of finding the pirate treasure long rumored to be buried near Cattail, consults every treasure-hunting volume that MotherVine stocks. But her dreams of rubies and pearls crash when she falls from the top of Cattail Lighthouse. Though the police rule her death a suicide, Callie has doubts. It seems odd that Eva would kill herself when she was so optimistic about finding the alleged treasure. And it seems more than a coincidence that Eva died 26 years to the day after the equally fatal plunge of Callie’s mother. When Eva’s daughter, Summer, brings Callie a poem that’s the first in a series of treasure-hunt clues, she decides to investigate. MotherVine’s book delivery service gives her the perfect excuse to question many of the island’s residents. The more she digs, the more she falls back in love with Cattail, with its annual Paint Your Door Red Day, its fabulous Cattaillion, and its handsome martial arts instructor, who sets her pulse racing.

Turns out you can go home again.