THERE'LL BE SHELL TO PAY

Maureen Nash returns to the Moon Shell, her shop on North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island, to confront a murder and other mysteries.

On her first trip to Ocracoke as the owner of the Moon Shell, Maureen survived a hurricane, met the ghost of Welsh pirate Emrys Lloyd, and solved a murder. Now she’s come back for good, with thanks to her neighbors Glady and Burt, who ran the shop in her absence. Missing from the scene are Emrys and Bonny, Maureen’s cat. Bonny turns up but Emrys does not, though he sends her a letter saying he found a treasure trove in a hidden attic above the shop. Police Capt. Rob Tate, who’s busy with the case of an unidentified corpse, stops by to get a note someone left on Maureen’s desk for him. He’s deeply disturbed when he reads the note, which says: “The dead woman is Lenrose.” It’s signed “Maureen Nash,” and appears to be in Maureen’s handwriting. What dead woman? He wants to know if Maureen is playing some kind of joke on him. There’s a visiting woman named Lenrose Sullivan, but she appears to be alive, well, and riding around ostentatiously with her husband, Victor, in their vintage Kaiser. Lenrose has dementia, and Victor, a friend of the man who left Maureen the Moon Shell, has what she thinks is an unhealthy interest in the shop and the special shell Emrys had carved. Maureen’s old friend Kathleen, who’s obsessed with figs, and Kathleen’s equally fig-obsessed friends Paula and Roberta are happy that they’ve rented a nearby cottage with a fig tree until the unpleasant smell there leads them to a body hidden in a tidal creek. When they take Maureen to view the crime scene, she discovers Emrys, who’s been stuck there. She’s amazed when Emrys identifies the body as Lenrose, whom Paula and Roberta knew online as another fig fan. Is Lenrose dead or alive?

History and shell lore combine in this beguiling tale.