Francine Mathews--Strolling Home to Nantucket

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  As we're coming up to Thanksgiving next week, I'm more than ready for an atmospheric Christmas mystery. Francine Mathews has just the ticket with her new Merry Folger Nantucket novel, DEATH ON A WINTER STROLL. This series has long been one of my favorites, and I couldn't wait to dive--or jingle!--into this one. 

Here Francine gives us a little taste of a magical Nantucket Christmas.

Strolling Home to Nantucket

Francine Mathews

When you fly from Colorado to an island thirty miles off the Massachusetts Coast the first weekend in December, dusk comes early. By the time you’ve boarded the nine-seater Cessna at Logan and been assigned the copilot’s seat, the runway lights are a brilliant map branching under darkness. You stare through the cramped windscreen at the tail of the Lufthansa jet waiting for takeoff right in front of you, the Cessna no bigger in comparison than a fly on the flank of a rhino. You lift up over the shoreline of Boston and turn south with the storm front, stretching its fingers across Cape Cod.

     Half an hour later, as you squint to penetrate the blackness of the sky, which is indeterminate from the blackness of the sea, a faint glow helps you pinpoint the horizon. Another few minutes, and the glow becomes starbursts, a scattering of lights that signifies tiny settlement in the vastness of the Atlantic. A few minutes more, and the short runway in the middle of the moors is flung like a necklace before the Cessna’s windscreen. You pitch forward, judder to the ground, come with a whine to a halt.

You’ve landed on Nantucket, and it’s the most magical time of the year.

My series detective, Meredith Folger, would argue the point, of course. Born and raised on the island, she’s convinced that every Nantucket day is magical. But the first weekend in December has been particularly special for the past half-century, because that’s when Santa arrives. Rounding Brant Point on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter, he makes his way from Straight Wharf to the top of Main Street in a raucous parade. Over ten thousand people throng the center of town, dressed as lighted Christmas trees, sexy elves, reindeer. For countless visitors, it’s a smashing kickoff to the holidays. For the island’s retailers, it’s a welcome infusion of cash in the midst of off-season. For Nantucket police, it’s a sometimes-exasperating exercise in crowd control.

For the past two years, Stroll was canceled due to the COVID pandemic. For two years, Nantucket has isolated in place, its shops empty, restaurants closed, school kids sent home, and beaches deserted.

This year, Merry knows, the pent-up demand of delayed gratification for in-person partying will make Stroll a killer weekend. Her force will be stretched to the limit. Add a television crew producing a streaming series in the middle of Polpis, and the Secretary of State’s family holed up in an ancestral home in town, and the security demands are mind-boggling.

And that’s before the first body is found...

Have yourself a Merry little Christmas.

No-nonsense Nantucket detective Merry Folger grapples with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and two murders as the island is overtaken by Hollywood stars and DC suits.

Nantucket Police Chief Meredith Folger is acutely conscious of the stress COVID-19 has placed on the community she loves. Although the island has proved a refuge for many during the pandemic, the cost to Nantucket has been high. Merry hopes that the Christmas Stroll, one of Nantucket’s favorite traditions, in which Main Street is transformed into a winter wonderland, will lift the island’s spirits. But the arrival of a large-scale TV production, and the Secretary of State and her family, complicates matters significantly.
 
The TV shoot is plagued with problems from within, as a shady, power-hungry producer clashes with strong-willed actors. Across Nantucket, the Secretary’s troubled stepson keeps shaking off his security detail to visit a dilapidated house near conservation land, where an intriguing recluse guards secrets of her own. With all parties overly conscious of spending too much time in the public eye and secrets swirling around both camps, it is difficult to parse what behavior is suspicious or not—until the bodies turn up.
 
Now, it’s up to Merry and Detective Howie Seitz to find a connection between two seemingly unconnected murders and catch the killer. But when everyone has a motive, and half of the suspects are politicians and actors, how can Merry and Howie tell fact from fiction?
 
This latest installment in critically acclaimed author Francine Mathews’s Merry Folger series is an immersive escape to festive Nantucket, a poignant exploration of grief as a result of parental absence, and a delicious new mystery to keep you guessing.

Francine Mathews/Stephanie Barron was born in Binghamton, New York, the last of six girls. She attended Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Since then, she has written 30 novels, including the critically acclaimed Nantucket Mystery series, the Jane Austen Mystery series, and a number of historical fiction and thriller novels. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

DEBS: Francine, thank you so much for the gorgeous photos and descriptions of Nantucket. I'd love to experience a Nantucket Christmas some day!

REDS and readers, where would you spend your dream Christmas?