UNDER THE STARS

Williams returns to the fictional Winthrop Island with this contemporary story wrapped around a 19th-century shipwreck mystery.

In 1846, Providence Dare writes a painfully detailed Account of the Wreck of the Steamship Atlantic. Traveling under a false name, she’s on the run after the death her employer, famous painter Henry Irving, for whom she’d served as muse with benefits since his wife’s death. As a storm kicks up not far from Winthrop Island and survival at sea seems increasingly unlikely, Providence realizes she’s been followed aboard by a detective with a warrant for her arrest—for murder. Is she a victim or a predator? The detective’s feelings for her are as complicated as hers for Mr. Irving. (Providence is fictional, but the Atlantic was a real ship that sank in Long Island Sound.) Excerpts from the Account wind around events taking place on Winthrop in 2024, where Williams fans will encounter characters from previous novels; new readers will find the introductory family tree essential as names and connections pile up. Audrey Fisher, a chef who recently lost her restaurant after her business partner husband absconded with all their money, returns to the island for the first time since she was 3. She’s chaperoning her mother, Meredith Fisher, a famous actress with a drinking problem. Meredith has returned to sober up in private on Winthrop Island, where she grew up, always desperate to leave. Soon Audrey meets her father, Mike Kennedy, for the first time since she was a kid, and begins falling in love with a nice man. Then some paintings show up in a trunk and a stranger appears to confront Meredith about her past, and before long all hell breaks loose. The parallels that abound between the two narratives—strange fires, selfish artists, characters on the run, dark-haired men, lies about sex and death—are fun. But with the exception of Meredith, to whom Williams gives layered complexity, cliched characters march through familiar plotting.

Carefully constructed, utterly predicable.