A Death in High Season: A Harbor Light Inn Cozy Mystery

The most famous sailor in America just died at her clambake. And Nora Marsh is the one who catered it.

It's high summer in Gull Harbor, Maine, the regatta is in full sail, and the Harbor Light Inn is finally booked solid. For Nora - city chef turned reluctant innkeeper - it should be the season that proves she made the right choice staying.

Then television's beloved "clean-living" yachtsman Whit Calloway collapses at the season's grand beach clambake, in front of three hundred witnesses, with Nora's drawn butter still warm on the table. The town wants to call it his heart. Nora's kitchen-trained eye knows better: somebody poisoned the one dish the health-famous sailor allowed himself - and to do it in plain sight took nerve, knowledge, and a grudge forty years deep.

The trouble is, the only obvious suspect is a stranger sleeping in Nora's best room. The likeliest killer is the most beloved woman in three harbors. And the detective Nora has started to fall for can't come within a mile of this case without blowing up the trial that's already hanging over the town.

To catch a champion everyone loves, Nora will have to read a clambake like a crime scene, follow a clue only a caterer would notice, and reopen a drowning the whole coast agreed to forget - before the killer decides the cook knows far too much.

Set in a salt-and-fog Maine harbor town you'll want to move to, A Death in High Season is the second Harbor Light Inn Mystery: a fair-play whodunit with a slow-burn romance, a cast you'll wish were your neighbors, an opinionated orange cat, and - of course - recipes from the inn's kitchen.

Pour yourself something hot, mind the tide, and check in. Just maybe skip the butter.