In this enjoyable cosy mystery, Maureen Nash arrives during the last kick of a departing hurricane at Ocracoke Island, off North Carolina; she has come to the barrier island to hunt for shells thrown up by the storm. Midlife and widowed, she’s not answerable to anyone but her two handsome sons back in Tennessee. COME SHELL OR HIGH WATER she’s going to indulge her seashell-collecting habit. The high water arrived sooner than she expected.
Maureen gets a boat ride to the island with Patricia Crowley, Park Ranger, ahead of other visitors. So, she’s the sole outsider present when a man’s body is discovered, making her a convenient suspect. In fact, it’s Maureen who first stumbles upon the body in the woods near the beach. Not long after, she’s knocked out and concussed by an electrical fault in her rental cottage. This creates an otherworldly, amusing style of narration, as Maureen keeps trying to remember events but fails, and keeps trying to make sense of people’s actions and odd voices. Like the man’s voice, she hears when nobody else is present in the local shell shop, The Moon Shell. Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, is the unfortunate victim, and the local sheriff’s deputy concludes he was murdered.
As the series is called Haunted Shell Shop, we might think the shop owner is a ghost; no, the shade is a long-dead seaman, potentially a pirate. The local folks don’t know about him, and they’re busy clearing up after the hurricane. Senior neighbours Burt and Glady Weaver – siblings, not a couple – help Maureen, and try to work out who could have committed the crime and why. Maureen is also still grieving her late husband Jeff, and talks to his memory occasionally. Deputy Frank Brown doesn’t like her, or any newcomers.
I don’t read many paranormal cosies, but in this case, Emrys Lloyd, the shade, is a pleasant and interesting personage, and the outcome kept me guessing, so I’ll come back and look for the next in the series. Author Molly MacRae lives in Tennessee, just right to bring the outsider’s point of view to her mystery COME SHELL OR HIGH WATER. She previously penned Haunted Yarn Shop mysteries among others. I like particularly that Maureen is a mollusc scientist, and can be expected to have specialist knowledge and a logical method of solving problems. She likes cats, always a good sign, and we meet a few cats during the adventure. Maureen is in two minds about returning home or staying longer; I am sure the series will demand residence on the island for another little while.
When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .
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.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
On the tail of a hurricane, half-drowned in the chaos of whirlwind, deluge, thunder, and lightning, I washed up on Ocracoke Island.
Okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. Hurricane Electra had blown through that week in mid-September but, as Atlantic hurricanes go, Electra was medium to mild. And I had arrived on Ocracoke, but I hadn’t washed ashore. I know a ranger in the U.S. Park Service, and she took me over in her boat, that afternoon, when she went to survey damage to the national park campground. I was half-drowned, but half-drowned by my assumptions, not the storm.
“Love the pink life jacket, Maureen,” Patricia had said over the gurgling engine noise of her boat before we set out from Hatteras Landing for the crossing to Ocracoke. Patricia Crowley and I have known each other since college, thirty-plus years. We don’t see each other often, but she always looks unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. “The pink looks good with your white knuckles. We haven’t left the dock yet, though, so you might want to give your grip a rest.”
My hands, both of them glued to the edge of whatever you call the dashboard thing on a Park Service boat, looked fine to me. “This cabin’s kind of small—”
“It’s a pilot house.”
“—and we’re standing shoulder to shoulder in it,” I pointed out, “so if I get seasick, I’ll step outside.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Okay.”
Patricia also sounds unruffled and in control when she’s in uniform. Despite her calm, my knuckles and I did not relax. That’s why, by the time Patricia eased the boat away from the dock, my knuckles looked like bleached bones. I stopped looking at them and concentrated on not whimpering. Or being sick.
“It’s getting kind of rough,” I said in a conversational whimper.
“This is the smooth part. Wait’ll we hit the waves in the inlet.”
“Maybe we should turn back?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
“I’m doing you an unauthorized favor by taking you along,” Patricia said. Shouted, because the engine was making more noise. “Remember that, in case anyone has occasion to ask, because it isn’t regulation, but we’ll get around that by not saying anything or, if pressed, by saying that a lot of what happens before, during, and after a hurricane isn’t regulation.”
“I really appreciate this.”
“Good. You should. And I’ll appreciate it if you return the favor by not falling overboard and by hoping we don’t founder.”
“Founder?”
“Sink.” She patted me on my drawn shoulders, and I thought about screaming “Don’t take your hands off the steering wheel,” but I didn’t want to distract her, in case it wasn’t called a steering wheel. It didn’t strike me as the best time for nautical vocabulary lessons.
On the other hand, the best time to go shelling on the sandy ribbon of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina is after a big blow like Electra. And because I’m a former malacologist (a biologist who studies mollusks, although freshwater mussels and not seashells, in my case), I could sort of make a case for being there. But confusion, disruptions, and mopping up follow even a mild hurricane. There was danger in the surging waves, and evacuated tourists hadn’t been given the all-clear yet to return and finish their idyllic beach vacations along the Outer Banks.
Also, there’s that former thing. I was a working malacologist, but those jobs, like some of the rarer freshwater mussels, are hard to find. I’m all about shells, though. I’ve been collecting them, and folklore, fables, and myths about them, for most of my life. I’ve had minor success publishing picture book retellings of the stories I’ve collected. I get occasional storytelling gigs, too. More than occasional, really. It still surprises me that I can call myself a professional storyteller. My late husband called me his fabulous fabulist.
So, yes, I arrived on the tail of the hurricane. I blew in to see what else had washed ashore. And I did cling to my assumptions because that’s how assumptions work. If I go to the trouble of making them, I figure I might as well believe in them. That’s why I thought I could be clever and careful enough to comb the deserted beaches for shells and not get into trouble. And it’s why I believed that my other reason for making the trip to the picturesque town at the southern tip of Ocracoke Island wasn’t totally mad, either.
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