Come Shell or High Water

From Molly MacRae, acclaimed author of the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, the first in a charming new series set on a beautiful barrier island off the coast of North Carolina and featuring a widowed folklorist, a seashell shop, and the ghost of an 18th century pirate...

As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger--the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .

In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.

Molly MacRae is the award-winning author of the Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries, the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, and the new Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries. Born and raised in Illinois, MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of Tennessee’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where she was the director of the history museum for Jonesborough, the state’s oldest town. During that time, MacRae and her family started taking vacations to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where she fell in love with Ocracoke Island, the setting for her Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries. MacRae, a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, has won the Sherwood Anderson Award for short fiction, and several of her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She currently lives in Champaign, IL with her family. For more information on Molly and her books, please visit MollyMacRae.com.