Series Debut – Haunted Shell Shop #1
Molly MacRae launches her new haunted shell shop mystery series with Come Shell or High Water. Newly widowed Maureen Nash heads to Ocracoke Island to follow up on some rather odd letters from the shell shop owner. Maureen is a Malacologist and teller of stories and legends. Malacologist is the term for someone who studies mollusks, an interesting factoid I enjoyed learning. One might think that Maureen of the mollusks could have picked a better time to visit the island than right in the middle of hurricane season. Apparently, though, that is a prime time to find some seaside treasures of the shelled variety. Maureen has quite the journey to the island, but the real adventure starts when she literally trips over a body, then stumbles through a series of unfortunate events that results in compromised memory, becoming a murder suspect, and meeting a ghost.
Emrys Lloyd, specter of the Moon Shell shop, is more than ready to speak with Maureen. His answers are evasive and mostly incomplete. She never seems able to nail down the whole picture as she tries to figure him out. She also has very limited time to do so, as Burt and Glady Weavers, siblings living across the street from the Moon Shell, keep her constant company. They also are key to pulling Maureen into investigating the murder itself, something she originally was more than willing to leave to local authorities. But her faith in the legal system is shaken by the literal good cop bad cop routine happening on the island. One seemingly dead set on casting her as the murderer, evidence or no, and the other far more willing to entertain other possible suspects and theories. Everyone is more than a little wary of each other to start, but soon realize that their best bet for finding the murderer is to work together. Maureen must decide who she can trust, whose stories she can believe, and if she should risk telling anyone else about her shell of a specter.
Molly MacRae does an excellent job of conveying Maureen’s confusion stemming from her injury and navigating the island. Readers are kept guessing from about everything from motives and alibis to the ghost himself. I found Burt and Glady a delightful rag-tag duo of detectives, constantly keeping both readers and Maureen guessing as to what they’ll do next. I enjoyed the duality of the police presence in the book as well. Molly MacRae has one very antagonistic and unpleasant detective that sets a reader’s teeth on edge, and also a kinder more reasonable one that truly does have the best interest of the islanders at heart. A lot of time you get one or the other in a cozy, but having both playing off and around each other really worked. I recommend Come Shell or High Water to readers who are looking for a new series full of great eccentric characters, an island getaway, and spectral shenanigans. I also was delighted at the use of one of my favorite pun-based exclamations being a shell of a lot throughout the book. Truly, Come Shell or High Water is a shell of a good time. – Carla Schantz