Death on a Winter Stroll

In this delicious new mystery from Francine Mathews, no-nonsense Nantucket detective Merry Folger must face her toughest adversaries yet when wannabe Hollywood stars take over the island in the midst of quarantine.

Chief among Nantucket Island's cherished traditions is Winter Stroll, when evergreen trees line Main Street and tourists and islanders share the spirit of the season in shops and restaurants gilded with firelight. This year, however, is different-the pandemic still threatens the lives of everyone determined to spend a long weekend thirty miles out at sea, with the closest ICU a helicopter flight away.

Nantucket Police Chief Meredith Folger is acutely conscious of the strain COVID-19 has taken on the community she loves. Year-round residents dependent on the island's support structure are ranged against an influx of wealthy mainland expatriates, quarantining in what they perceive as a germ-free, isolated sanctuary. Chief among them: an oblivious bubble of Hollywood glitterati, cohabiting in an expansive island compound, while they film a television series on the Nantucket moors.

When the twenty-eight-year-old female lead is murdered on location, Merry's chosen detective, Howie Seitz, is dispatched to the scene. A number of people might have wanted Clara Forsyte dead: her neurotic personal assistant; her volatile boyfriend; her secret longtime lover, who is also the current U.S. Secretary of State-or Secretary Chenoweth's embittered wife, Sarah.

But while Howie has his hands full with that investigation, Chief Folger responds to a different kind of request: that of a lonely woman at the end of her resources, dying in a derelict house no one has entered for years. Artist Blythe Fitzpatrick has returned to Nantucket as a final act of protest. Can Merry divine a purpose in the woman's death? And how might Blythe's end be linked to the star-struck murder on the moors?