The Boat That Came Back Empty: A Cranberry Cove Cozy Mystery, Book Six

Merrick Nye told the whole town he was leaving. Three days later his boat came home without him.No body. No blood. No note. Just thirty-eight feet of working lobster boat coming into Cranberry Cove on the February tide with her engine idling, her radio on, and nobody at all aboard.The Coast Guard searches for four days. Twenty-two boats go out of that harbor in the rain and lose money to do it. And when the search is called off, the town settles gratefully on the story that fits: a man alone on a winter boat, a wet rail, a cold sea. It happens somewhere on this coast most winters, and there is not one soul on that pier who finds it in the least surprising.Eight months pregnant and out of patience with being told to sit down, baker Hazel Quinn can't get past the smallest wrongness of all. The Bright Sally came home with her fenders out. You put your fenders down when you're coming alongside something. You don't haul traps with them dragging in the water. And Merrick Nye fished that boat for thirty-one years.There is a nine-year-old boy at the middle of this, and a woman who has raised him for nine years and is nobody at all on paper, and a question nobody in Cranberry Cove has thought to ask out loud: in six weeks of telling the whole town he was going to Florida, Merrick Nye never once said what was supposed to happen to his son.Meanwhile the hundred-year-old thing is closing in. A nine-month-old baby went out of this harbor in November of 1911 and left no mark on any register anywhere - and somebody in this town has been walking around ever since not knowing whose they are.A warm, twisty, small-town mystery with a gentle heart, a town you'll want to move to, and no gore on the page - plus two of Hazel's recipes at the back.The Cranberry Cove Mysteries can be read in any order, but they're best in order. This is Book Six.