SAFE HARBOR

Another misty-eyed tale of family ties that bind, with the addition of a trendy love affair between an older woman and a younger man as a sister confronts a mystery and takes charge of her two nieces.

Rice is a deft scene-setter and sketcher of character, and here, her hero Sam, the skinny “wharf rat” from Newport who became a Yale professor of oceanography, is a standout. The storyline, though initially promising, is less satisfactory. When his sailing instructors, the beautiful Underhill sisters Dana and Lily (first met in Firefly Beach, 2001), rescued eight-year-old Sam Trevor from drowning in Newport harbor, he vowed that he would protect them forever. Twenty-plus years later he finds himself doing just that as he meets up with Dana, now a successful painter who lives abroad but is in the US to take her nieces Quinn and Allie back to France with her, since the nieces’ parents, Lily and Mike, drowned the previous summer during a midnight sail across Long Island Sound. But Dana’s plan to return to France is stalled by Quinn, who, going on 13, is determined not to leave the spot where she keeps vigil every night for her dead parents. Sam meets Dana at a local showing of her work, and soon she’s depending on him for help with the two girls. After they miss their plane to France, Dana, suffering from painter’s block as well as from a failed love affair, decides to stay on, at least for the summer. She learns that there’s a mystery about Lily’s death and that Quinn is deeply troubled by something. Sam helps Dana do some low-key detecting, but when Quinn asks Sam to investigate the wreck, and he does, answers—as well as affirmations—soon follow.

More a romance than a realistic take on love and family, but Rice fans won’t mind.