Off-Season at Halcyon Bay
(2026)(The first book in the Off-Season Mystery series)
A Story by Wanda Fellows
A travel writer with a vintage Airstream and an opinionated terrier arrives on a fogbound island in February — and finds a body at the bottom of the hotel steps. Danielle "Danny" Reyes made a whole second career out of visiting beautiful places at exactly the wrong time of year. Halcyon Island in the dead of winter is her kind of story: the taffy shops shuttered, the pier wrapped in fog, the grand old Sea Glass Hotel running on a skeleton crew, and the Sandpiper diner the one lit window in town, where Birdie Malloy keeps the coffee coming and the marionberry pie under glass. The only way on or off the island is a winter ferry that stops running when the weather turns. Danny came for a column about faded grandeur. She got a storm, a dead developer, and forty year-round neighbors who aren't especially sorry.
The sheriff is stretched thin and happy to call it an accidental fall. But Roland Landry's overcoat is bone dry, and a man who fell in a downpour ought to be soaked through. When the caretaker Landry fired the day he died — a woman Danny has already come to like — turns into the obvious suspect, Danny can't let the easy answer stand. She isn't a cop or a detective. She's a woman with a notebook, a photographer she can't stop looking at, a best friend who knows everybody's business within an hour of arrival, and a research folder full of the dullest paperwork on earth: tide tables and a winter ferry schedule. Somebody on this island is counting on nobody checking. On Halcyon Island in February, the wrong season turns out to be exactly the right season for catching a liar.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
The sheriff is stretched thin and happy to call it an accidental fall. But Roland Landry's overcoat is bone dry, and a man who fell in a downpour ought to be soaked through. When the caretaker Landry fired the day he died — a woman Danny has already come to like — turns into the obvious suspect, Danny can't let the easy answer stand. She isn't a cop or a detective. She's a woman with a notebook, a photographer she can't stop looking at, a best friend who knows everybody's business within an hour of arrival, and a research folder full of the dullest paperwork on earth: tide tables and a winter ferry schedule. Somebody on this island is counting on nobody checking. On Halcyon Island in February, the wrong season turns out to be exactly the right season for catching a liar.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Wanda Fellows's Off-Season at Halcyon Bay