I’ve spent my whole life on an island thirty miles off the East Coast, the tail-end of a glacial moraine left behind by the last Ice Age. Nantucket is roughly fifteen miles long and maybe five miles wide; lashed by nor-easters in winter, when all sound except the Coast Guard horns is deadened by sudden squalls of snow and fog. The shingled New England saltboxes are every shade of gray, except for the exclamation points of their colorful front doors: sea blue and old rose, turquoise and geranium. The hummocky moors, tangled with cranberry and scrub oak and rosa rugosa where they meet the coastal dunes, are profound in their loneliness and isolation. Over half the island is preservation land that no one can build on; the remainder is so valuable that it’s impossible to buy. Nantucket is one of the most glamorous destination resorts on earth, the Beverly Hills of the Atlantic, the Aspen of the sea. So many of the Beautiful and the Damned land their private jets at Ackerman Field in July and August that longtime residents swear the island sinks two feet under the weight of their luggage alone.

There have been Folgers on Nantucket since 1663, when my ancestor Peter moved his family here from Martha’s Vineyard. Four years later he had a baby girl named Abiah—my middle name, by the way—who grew up herself to have Benjamin Franklin for her son. That’s nice to know, and a mild source of pride, but on Nantucket the name Folger has a more complicated history: It stands for crime and punishment and the long arm of the Law. My dad ran the Nantucket police force until a few years ago, and my grandfather—Ralph Waldo Folger–was police chief before him. I’m the third generation Folger to wear a Nantucket P.D. badge.

Sound like a cushy job? I mean, how much is there to prosecute in Paradise? The drug habits of the wealthy and their entitled teenagers? A drunken brawl among the yachters in the Boat Basin? Shoplifters tempted by ivory-topped Nantucket baskets and hammered gold scallop earrings and the occasional Oversand Vehicle Permit t-shirt?

Implicit in every notion of Paradise is violence.

Pain, injury, murder.

I’ve learned something about violence over the past ten years. Violence springs from conflict: the clash of values, the clash of ambitions, the clash of one person wanting what another too obviously has. This fishhook of land dropped in the middle of the Atlantic inspires every kind of conflict, because each of us who comes to Nantucket believes deep in herself that the island speaks to her personally, that she has a right to claim it for her own. Twelfth-generation Nantucketers know that in their bones; but day-trippers off the Hyannis ferry, too, have a quickening of desire to belong to this life. It seduces and beguiles. Everyone wants their own private island. Until they have to fight for what they want, and confront just how much they’re willing to lose.

So some days I crawl on my hands and knees through the tick-infested undergrowth, searching for fragments of fabric and bone. Some days I descend by a Coast Guard winch onto the deck of a grounded yacht, shining a flashlight into the canted hold. Some days I simply watch the summer kids swing on the playground near Children’s Beach, or allow the vast reach of the Milky Way to sweep into my soul from the roof of Peter Mason’s old house on Cliff Road, or linger over a glass of wine with friends at my favorite restaurant, Dune.

But part of me is always waiting, and listening. For the moment when desire becomes need—need becomes conflict—and conflict erupts into violence.

Death on Tuckernuck is the sixth book in the “Merry Folger” traditional mystery series, released April 28, 2020.

In the Category 3 winds of a late-season hurricane, Nantucket police detective Merry Folger and her team attempt a rescue off the secluded island of Tuckernuck—only to discover a deadly secret.

As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from a stubborn elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback. But as the storm surge rises and the surf warnings mount, Dionis has to make a choice: abandon whatever—or whoever—was left behind, or risk her own life by plunging back into the maelstrom. Even she has no idea what evil the hurricane is sheltering.

When the coast guard notifies the Nantucket police of a luxury yacht grounded in the shoals off Tuckernuck’s northern edge—with two shooting victims lying in the main cabin—detective Meredith Folger throws herself into an investigation before the hurricane sweeps all crime-scene evidence out to sea. Merry is supposed to be on leave this weekend, dancing at her own wedding, but the Cat 3 has thrown her blissful plans into chaos. As her battered house fills with stranded wedding guests and flood waters rise all over Nantucket Island, Merry has her own choice to make: How much should she risk in order to bring a criminal to justice?

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Meet the author
Francine Mathews, who also writes as Stephanie Barron, is the author of nearly thirty novels of mystery, espionage, and women’s fiction, including the Merry Folger Nantucket Mysteries and the Jane Austen Mystery Series. Death on Tuckernuck, the sixth Merry Folger novel, was published by Soho Crime on April 28th. Francine lives and writes in Denver, Colorado. Visit her website at francinemathews.com.

All comments are welcomed.