Showing results by author "Molly MacRae" in All Categories

As a 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.

Maureen is still getting used to life on Ocracoke Island, learning how to play the "shell game" of her business—and ghost whispering with the spirit of Emrys Lloyd, the eighteenth-century Welsh pirate who haunts her shop, The Moon Shell. The spectral buccaneer has unburied a treasure hidden in the shop's attic that turns out to be antique shell art stolen from Maureen's late husband's family years ago.

Out for a bicycle ride in the hills beyond Inversgail, Janet Marsh discovers the body of Dr. Malcolm Murray. The elderly Murray and his own bicycle went off the road and down a steep slope - he’s sprawled in the burn at the bottom, his damaged bike in a patch of thistles on the bank. Tire tracks at the side of the narrow road suggest a vehicle might have been involved. But who would want the well-loved retired doctor dead?

After ninety-three well-lived years, Violet MacAskill is ready to simplify her life. Her eccentric solution? She’ll throw a decanting and decluttering party at her family home—a Scottish Baronial manor near the seaside town of Inversgail. She sets aside everything she wants or needs, then she invites her many friends in to sip sherry and help themselves to whatever they want from all that’s left. Janet Marsh and Christine Robertson, two of the women who own Yon Bonnie Books in Inversgail, enjoy themselves at the party. Not everyone who attends has a good time, though. 

True-crime writer Heather Kilbride arrives in the seacoast town of Inversgail, Scotland, to research a recent murder for her new book. But if that’s true, why does she seem more interested in William Clark, a shadowy lawyer with no connection to the murder? Her nosy questions arouse the suspicions of Constable Hobbs, the members of a local writers’ group, and Janet Marsh and her crew of amateur sleuths at Yon Bonnie Books. Then Heather is found dead - twice....

Yarn shop owner Kath Rutledge is looking forward to the grand opening of the Blue Plum Vault, a co-op of small shops on Main Street. In the week before the grand opening, Kath and her needlework group, TGIF, hear rumors of an unpleasant rivalry developing between two of the new shopkeepers: Nervie Bales and Belinda Moyer. The opening is a success - until Belinda is found dead, stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors from Kath's shop.

All Lewis Wilder wants to do is take care of his museum of local history, but crime is on the rise in his small town, and being the newcomer, suspicious eyes are turning in his direction.

On North Carolina’s Okracoke Island, Maureen Nash sells exquisite seashells to locals and tourists—with Bonny the shop cat and the ghost of a Welsh pirate for company. And when needed, she steps in to help the police solve a murder… Dr. Irving Allred is boasting around town that he’s about to get his hands on an authentic haunted sword. But minutes after Maureen hears the story, a woman walks into the Moon Shell, sword in hand. She found it while walking her bulldog on the beach—and its blade is stained with what looks like blood. Looks like it’s time to call the sheriff’s department.