The Second Shooter

The Thursday Murder Club if the cozy was hiding something real. A short Outer Banks 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, a six-mile barrier island in North Carolina's Outer Banks, the Ginger Mae Coffee Shop has opened at seven-fifteen for forty years, long enough to know the regulars, their orders, and the things they leave unsaid. Victoria, Olivia, and Solei inherited the shop from its founder, Marjorie Corey Knapp, though nobody on the island has called her Marjorie in forty years. To everyone here she is Grandma Knapp, and she is fading now, 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 Adley Brindendale, their most faithful regular, dies in what the coroner rules an accidental fall, the three women begin to notice things. A flask in his coat monogrammed with the wrong initials. Two windows painted shut and one left open. Bees inside a closed kitchen. An epinephrine pen that should have saved him and somehow did not.

The trail runs from a storage shed on the island's south end to a shuttered casino on the Florida coast with one lit window, and then to a federal building where an agent opens a folder, lays down a black-and-white photograph from November 1963, and points to a man standing very still at the edge of the frame, looking the wrong direction.

THE SECOND SHOOTER is Book One of The Marjorie Corey Files, a complete five-book series of warmly atmospheric island mysteries about what you carry, what you inherit, and what it means to finally learn who someone was. Every book circles the same question: who was Marjorie Corey before she was anyone's grandmother? For readers of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Jacqueline Winspear.

Warm. Literary. Quietly devastating. The bell above the door always rings.