The December Guest
(2026)(The fifth book in the Sand Dollar Detective series)
A novel by Marin Wilder
For nineteen Decembers the same guest rented the same cottage for the same week. This year he did not leave.
Tom Bracewell came to Sand Dollar Cove every December — a big man with a good coat who valued the contents of dead people’s houses for a living and had somehow become part of the town’s winter.
He remembered names. He overtipped. He once fixed a porch step with a borrowed drill because it annoyed him.
On Thursday morning, Tom is found dead in the cottage at the end of Sanderling Lane.
Two drawers have been pulled from a bureau.
And forty thousand dollars in cash is sitting untouched on a bedroom shelf.
Within a week, Sand Dollar Cove has decided a stranger did it.
The Sand Dollar Detective Club does not.
Grace Sullivan has run the Sand Dollar Inn for twenty years by being the woman who pours the coffee, remembers what everyone needs, and rarely says the difficult thing first.
She has sent overflow guests down Sanderling Lane for seventeen of those years. And now she has heard something in the way one woman speaks about Tom — a name she never once uses — that Grace cannot put down.
She cannot prove it.
And she has been wrong before.
Then the cellar beneath the inn gives up a box that has been sitting untouched for twenty years: nine drafts of a letter and a list of thirty-one names, written by a young woman who walked into a storm in 1988 and never came back for them.
While Christmas settles over the Cove, Grace finds herself caught between a murder she may understand before she can prove it, an old secret buried beneath her own inn, and a marine biologist in room three who is becoming considerably harder to think of as merely another guest.
Eight women. One winter murder. And a town that has spent thirty-eight years hoping nobody would ask the right question.
The December Guest is the fifth novel in The Sand Dollar Detective Club, a warm, witty, fair-play coastal mystery series for readers of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, Elin Hilderbrand, and Louise Penny.
Every book solves its own mystery completely and can be read on its own. Together, the novels unravel the one secret this town would do anything to keep buried.
Expect clever clues, genuine emotional stakes, strong female friendships, a touch of slow-burn romance, and a seaside town you’ll want to return to again and again — with no gore and no cliffhanger on the central mystery.
Perfect for readers who love:
Tom Bracewell came to Sand Dollar Cove every December — a big man with a good coat who valued the contents of dead people’s houses for a living and had somehow become part of the town’s winter.
He remembered names. He overtipped. He once fixed a porch step with a borrowed drill because it annoyed him.
On Thursday morning, Tom is found dead in the cottage at the end of Sanderling Lane.
Two drawers have been pulled from a bureau.
And forty thousand dollars in cash is sitting untouched on a bedroom shelf.
Within a week, Sand Dollar Cove has decided a stranger did it.
The Sand Dollar Detective Club does not.
Grace Sullivan has run the Sand Dollar Inn for twenty years by being the woman who pours the coffee, remembers what everyone needs, and rarely says the difficult thing first.
She has sent overflow guests down Sanderling Lane for seventeen of those years. And now she has heard something in the way one woman speaks about Tom — a name she never once uses — that Grace cannot put down.
She cannot prove it.
And she has been wrong before.
Then the cellar beneath the inn gives up a box that has been sitting untouched for twenty years: nine drafts of a letter and a list of thirty-one names, written by a young woman who walked into a storm in 1988 and never came back for them.
While Christmas settles over the Cove, Grace finds herself caught between a murder she may understand before she can prove it, an old secret buried beneath her own inn, and a marine biologist in room three who is becoming considerably harder to think of as merely another guest.
Eight women. One winter murder. And a town that has spent thirty-eight years hoping nobody would ask the right question.
The December Guest is the fifth novel in The Sand Dollar Detective Club, a warm, witty, fair-play coastal mystery series for readers of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, Elin Hilderbrand, and Louise Penny.
Every book solves its own mystery completely and can be read on its own. Together, the novels unravel the one secret this town would do anything to keep buried.
Expect clever clues, genuine emotional stakes, strong female friendships, a touch of slow-burn romance, and a seaside town you’ll want to return to again and again — with no gore and no cliffhanger on the central mystery.
Perfect for readers who love:
- Coastal mysteries and buried small-town secrets
Strong female friendships and found family
Older protagonists with real lives, losses, and histories
Fair-play mysteries you can solve alongside the characters
Slow-burn romance woven into the mystery
Clean, suspenseful crime fiction without gore
A deeper mystery unfolding across a complete series
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Marin Wilder's The December Guest