Death on Tuckernuck

February 10, 2020
Much of the action of Mathews’s gripping sixth Merry Folger mystery (after 2017’s Death on Nantucket) occurs on Tuckernuck, “the small island trailing like an afterthought off the western end of Nantucket.” At the end of September, most of Tuckernuck’s inhabitants have departed, leaving the island’s caretakers, Dionis Mather and her father, Jack, to evacuate the remaining residents as a hurricane approaches, though Jack has to abandon the task after suffering a heart attack. Meanwhile, Nantucket police detective Meredith “Merry” Folger is getting married soon, but the discovery of two gunshot victims aboard a yacht that runs aground on Tuckernuck during the storm ensures she’ll be on the job right up to her wedding day. A Coast Guard team is able to rescue the victims, but one dies on the helicopter flight to Nantucket, and the other remains in a coma in the hospital. At the peak of the hurricane, Dionis is trapped alone on Tuckernuck, until she meets a stranger with a gunshot wound in his hand. Readers will keep turning the pages to see what happens next. Mathews once again displays her storytelling powers. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary.

March 1, 2020
A wedding, a hurricane, and a murder combine in a breathtaking m�lange. Little do Nantucket police officer Meredith Folger and her fiance, Peter Mason (Death on Nantucket, 2017, etc.), know that their last-minute wedding plans are soon to go awry. Since cold, distant new police chief Bob Pocock cuts Merry no slack, she's working until the last minute. Dionis Mather and her father, Jack, have a family business taking care of the denizens of Tuckernuck, a small private island off the grid, who are completely dependent on the Mathers' boats to ferry them and all their supplies from nearby Nantucket. When a hurricane is forecast, Dionis and Jack mobilize to help the few still left on the island in September board up their houses and leave for Nantucket before the storm strikes. The only flies in the ointment are entitled NFL quarterback Todd Benson and his supermodel wife, who have nothing to do with the rest of the islanders, most of whose houses have been handed down through generations. Although the Bensons are not at their recently built mansion, they've left two horses and their stable girl, Mandy, without any plans for their safety. Mandy turns up as the Mathers are evacuating the last people, demanding a seat on the boat and refusing to stay with the horses. As the Category 3 storm approaches, Dionis sees and reports a distress rocket off Tuckernuck to the Coast Guard. Jack suffers a heart attack, and she promises him she'll return and help those horses. The Coast Guard sends a chopper to a grounded yacht, where they find two people badly wounded. The woman dies on the way to the hospital, and the man's head wound renders him unable to answer questions, giving Merry a possible murder to solve. Dionis ends up marooned on Tuckernuck at the height of the storm, caring for both horses and a man with a bullet wound. Can Merry work out the relations among all these doings before her wedding day? An exhilarating, page-turning blend of mystery, detection, romance, and people-versus-the-elements.

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April 1, 2020
A Category 3 hurricane barrels toward New England, and, amid the chaos, a run-aground yacht is found with two shooting victims and a million-dollar stash of heroin on board. Add in her impending wedding, and Nantucket police detective Meredith "Merry" Folger has her hands full. Nature's fury and the frantic, batten-down-the-hatches scramble to protect man and beast make for gloriously tense reading, but unfortunately leaves the mystery little more than an afterthought?neatly wrapped up in less than a dozen pages. Still, the race against the clock is thrilling, and the remote island setting, where everyone knows their neighbors and police must do without state-of-the-art crime labs, makes the title a good fit for fans of rural or small-town police procedurals. While enjoyable as a stand-alone, this sixth series outing is of particular interest to longtime fans in terms of emotional payoff as Merry makes significant life changes on both a professional and a personal level.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)