But I've know Francine longest as the author of the contemporary Nantucket Mysteries, featuring Nantucket police detective Merry Folger. Death on Tuckernuck is the sixth and newest book in the series.
The Washington Post says of it, "A mystery that’s so suspenseful it’s hard not to skip a chapter to see if certain deeply likable characters are still alive . . . The novel lives and breathes New England island life, with a plot brimming with the best kinds of rude surprises," and I totally agree! Here's Francine to share her inspiration for this suspenseful and atmospheric mystery.
A
VERY PRIVATE MURDER:
DEATH
ON TUCKERNUCK ISLAND
I am emphatically not a morning person. And
that Wednesday in July I was doubly groggy from waking every hour the previous night,
in a subliminal terror that I might oversleep. So as I turned my rental car into
the Madaket road and headed for Hither Creek at seven-thirty a.m., coffee cup
at the ready, I plugged a vague address into my phone’s GPS app just to be
certain I arrived where I needed to be.
Jackson Point, on the western end of Nantucket
Island.
There was a boat waiting there I couldn’t afford to
miss, owned by a man I’d never met, and had only spoken to once. If I got lost
or didn’t appear by eight a.m., he’d leave me behind without a second thought. He’d
agreed only reluctantly to make room for a passenger on his morning run across
Madaket Harbor, and he’d probably be relieved if I didn’t show. I was
determined that wouldn’t happen. I’d been trying to catch this boat for the
better part of a year.
I write a series of detective novels set on
Nantucket, featuring a woman police detective named Meredith Folger. I’d
researched five novels in this idyllic setting, part historic New England
whaling town and part sybaritic playground, but this morning I was on a mission
to get off the island and onto neighboring Tuckernuck--a scrap of sand
nine hundred acres round that sits in the Atlantic a mile and a half from
Nantucket’s left coast. There is no public ferry between the town of Madaket
and Tuckernuck’s Lagoon, as it’s called, where a handful of boats are moored.
Neither
is there any public access, per se, on Tuckernuck itself. The place is entirely
owned by the few families that have passed down houses through multiple
generations. There are no paved roads, no beach stands or coffee shops, no gas
station or package store, no roadside shack selling sand spades and boogie
boards. No restaurant or art gallery. No electrical grid. No public water. Not
much cell phone coverage, and next to no internet. It is a place of generators
and oil stoves, the night sky brilliant with stars.
And unlike nearby Nantucket, there are no tourists
or day trippers on Tuckernuck. The island is intensely private, and its
residents are fiercely protective of their peace and isolation. To set foot on
the Lagoon’s gantry dock or one of Tuckernuck’s beaches, one must be a resident
or an invited guest.
I, of course, was neither.
I was mounting what we used to call, in my old days
as a CIA analyst, an Intel Op. I was deliberately penetrating a Denied Area
with the goal of collecting privileged information. I was, in short, a writer
determined to research the perfect location for a murder. And I had gone to
idiotic efforts to make it happen.
The previous summer, I’d appeared at the Nantucket Book
Festival and cheerfully announced in my author presentation that I wanted
access to Tuckernuck, hoping some local reader would be thrilled to arrange it
for me.
No one was thrilled.
I’d queried Nantucket friends, residents with boats,
about taking me over. All of them looked leery. “It’s private property, you
know,” they said. “You’ll really can’t go out there.”
In Colorado that winter, I contacted a friend with
the last name of Coffin, whose ancestors were some of the first people to build
houses on Tuck early two hundred years ago. He’d never been there himself. But
he had a few friends who’d summered there all their lives. He gave me their
names and email addresses. Slowly, gradually, I formed a network of people
whose memories I could tap, whose teenage experiences threw light on a
community so cut off from the rest of the world it might as well have been
Everest.
One of them, in turn, gave me a phone number for a
guy named Manny. He was a Caretaker, she said. Or in another words, a man with a
boat and the keys to Tuckernuck’s kingdom.
Caretakers are professionals who sustain life on
Tuckernuck. They are hired by the small island’s residents to spend a good part
of their lives from mid-May to mid-October ferrying everything necessary for a
comfortable existence between Jackson Point and the Lagoon. This includes
blankets, toilet paper, strawberries, cases of wine, rose bushes, lawn mowers, steaks,
tonic water, limes, solar panels, Portuguese bread, propane, gin, patio
umbrellas, sacks of dog food, lawn chairs, milk, pate, and paint. Anything you
might consider necessary for happiness, including the one-hundred and
twenty-five guests you invited to your Tuckernuck wedding, can be transported
by a Caretaker’s boat, and then removed—along with your week’s worth of trash
and your dead wedding bouquets.
The Caretakers are people of deep and hard-won
institutional knowledge. Tuckernuck is surrounded by constantly shifting shoals
of sand, so unpredictable and wayward that they are merely dotted lines on
nautical charts. To navigate the channel into the Lagoon is a tricky and
oft-revised endeavor, best accomplished by those who tackle it daily. The Coast
Guard avoids Tuckernuck; the draft of its boats is too deep. There is no fire
department or police presence on the barrier island, no EMTs. Consider, then,
what happens in an emergency—medical, or otherwise. A fire, perhaps, or an act
of violence. A sudden stroke in the brain or a clot in an artery. Each trip
between Tuckernuck and Madaket takes roughly twenty minutes, in good weather. Call
it an hour by boat to the hospital in the best of circumstances.
But what, my feverish imagination asked, about a
crisis in the worst of circumstances? --A vessel grounded on one of
Tuckernuck’s shoals, say, as a hurricane bore down on New England?
--And what if there was a body in that boat?
How would the police respond, in the form of
Meredith Folger?
And what would happen when a crime scene was set
adrift in a gale?
This is how writers amuse themselves. How we pass
the time. But Caretakers? They’re the ones who answer cries for help. Who stand
between life and death. Who might get marooned with a killer in the midst of a
natural disaster.
I left my car in the unpaved beach permit lot. There
were only two boats idling off the landing. One was a local sportfisherman’s,
calibrating the best spot to drop anchor. The other was a scuffed, well-used,
and perfectly ordinary aluminum working boat with an outboard motor lowered for
action. A guy in a gray sweatshirt was shifting gear around the bow.
“Are you Manny?” I called out to him, breathless.
He shook his head. “I’m George.” In his broad New
England accent, it came out as Geoahrge. “Manny’s my brother.”
“He agreed to take me to Tuckernuck.”
“Oh, yeah?” George surveyed me speculatively. “Who
you going to see?”
I uttered a name. George shook his head. “He’s not
there. Left Saturday.”
“I know,” I attempted. “He offered to rent me a
cottage. I’m going over to look at it.”
“Yeah?” George was persistently skeptical. “What are
you gonna do over there?”
“Walk to the house.”
“You know there are people living in it now, right?
You can’t bother them.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You can’t just walk around. It’s all private
property.”
Yes, I knew.
I subsided meekly on the dock, pacing while I drank
my coffee. George heaved empty trash bins into the belly of his craft. Every
scrap of garbage generated on Tuck has to be carried back by boat and then
trucked to the Nantucket landfill. The smell of diesel fuel and brine rose from
the pilings. A gull or two dipped its wings overhead. Then Manny arrived, all
grizzled beard and swordfisher’s cap thrust back on his mane of hair, and
studied me with his brother’s blunt speculation.
“Who you going out there to see, again?” he asked.
I muttered the name.
Manny scratched his head and gazed out over the
harbor at the thin graphite smudge on the horizon that was Tuckernuck. “Don’t
look in any windows or walk down any driveways. Don’t bother anybody. We’ll
take you off at noon. Got it?”
I got it. I scrambled onto the middle seat of the
boat and tried to look as small as possible. George cast off the painter while
Manny fired up the motor. And then the boat backed and turned with a wave for
the neighboring fisherman, and we headed out to sea.
What remains in my memory now of those hours on
Tuckernuck is the eeriness of the empty landscape. Colonies of birds in the
thousands, screaming above the eggs they’d laid in the sand and dune grasses. A
white-tailed deer; a lone heron in the marsh; a snake slithering across the
sandy track beneath my feet. The desolation of an abandoned house, engulfed in
decades of scrub oak and rugosa. The wind, and the echoing impression of
silence when it dropped.
I walked the entire perimeter of the island and much
of the interior, and encountered only a single other soul, as lost and out of
her depth as I was. But I returned to downtown Nantucket that night with a
vivid mental notebook of impressions and anecdotes imparted by Manny and
George. I had only to mention, on our return trip to Jackson Point, that I’d
worked as a nanny on the island forty years before, and suddenly, I was
acceptable—a working stiff, too, who like them had catered to Summer People.
They unbent and told me a few things about their lives. How they, too, owned a second
home on Tuckernuck, along with the fleet of boats that serviced its residents;
how deep the Milky Way could be on clear nights; how precious the isolation and
peace could seem, in the height of Nantucket’s tourist frenzy. Manny and George
gave me passage to the forbidden place, yes, but they gave me something more
valuable—the stuff of character. Months later, writing Death on Tuckernuck in
a Colorado winter, it was the Caretakers who’d lasted.
I hope they and their remarkable island come as much
alive in the pages of my latest book, for you.
More about Death on Tuckernuck: 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 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. 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?DEBS: Reds and readers, would you want to spend a long summer in such an isolated place?
Comment below to be eligible for this fab giveaway from Francine!
Signed trade paperbacks of the previous 5 books in the series
A Women’s size M Nantucket Beach Permit T-shirt
A jar of Bartlett’s Farm Beach Plum jelly
12 oz. Nantucket CoffeeRoasters Sconset Blend
A Beach Sign key fob from iconic Murray’s Toggery
A shatterproof thumbprint wine glass with a silhouette of Nantucket.
Francine Mathews, who also writes as Stephanie Barron, is the author of 29 novels of mystery, espionage, and historical fiction. A former intelligence analyst at the CIA, she lives and writes in Colorado. DEATH ON TUCKERNUCK is available now from Soho Crime.
