ANGEL'S HEAD

Nobody changes Angel's Head Island, nestled a few hundred yards and years off Cape Cod; people who don't share the Flood family's centuries-old closeness to the sea just leave, as journalist Mark Emmons and developer Eliot Bedrosian both did years ago after variously abortive affairs with innkeeper Anne Flood. Now both Emmons and Bedrosian are back, the developer with new designs on Anne and his long-cherished project of a bridge connecting the island to the mainland. But he isn't going to succeed this time, either, because somebody's gutted him and carefully placed his heart in the Floods' storage locker. A die-hard opponent of the bridge, evidently—and there are plenty of those—but then why is the second victim, a cousin of patriarch Emerson Flood, one of the bridge's most outspoken opponents? Emmons, the mainland police, and Anne's inquisitive teenage daughter Sarah all work at cross- purposes to solve a mystery that's never all that mysterious. As in Winter by Degrees (1988), great scenery, hit-or-miss plotting, suitably hooded characters, and a handful of powerfully craggy episodes.