The Second Shooter

The Thursday Murder Club if the cozy was hiding something real. A short island mystery that opens with a cup of ginger tea and ends at a sixty-year-old photograph no one was ever meant to find.

On Patchogu Island, North Carolina, the Ginger Mae Coffee Shop has opened at seven-fifteen for forty years. Victoria, Olivia, and Solei inherited it from its founder, the woman the island calls Grandma Knapp, who is fading now and filling the gaps in her memory with old films. Almost everything she says can be traced to a late movie. One phrase cannot: Hawkeye was there.

When their most faithful regular dies in what the coroner rules an accidental fall, the three women begin to notice things. A flask monogrammed with the wrong initials. Two windows painted shut and one left open. An epinephrine pen that should have saved him and somehow did not.

The trail runs from a storage shed to a shuttered Florida casino with one lit window, and then to a federal building where an agent lays down a black-and-white photograph from November 1963 and points to a man at the edge of the frame, looking the wrong direction.

THE SECOND SHOOTER is Book One of The Marjorie Corey Files, a complete series of warmly atmospheric island mysteries. For readers of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Jacqueline Winspear.