Secrets Beneath the Boardwalk
(2026)(The third book in the Sand Dollar Detective series)
A novel by Marin Wilder
She left the emergency room so she'd never again be the one who had to know. Then the storm opened the boardwalk.
Elena Rivera gave thirty years to an emergency room and two years to pretending she'd forgotten how. Sand Dollar Cove was supposed to be the place she set it down — sunrise coffee on the sand, seven women who never ask what she used to be, a little Cape Cod beach town where the worst thing that happens in September is the weather.Then a restaurant partner is found dead behind a locked boardwalk door, and the whole Cove agrees, a little too quickly, that it was a robbery gone wrong.
Elena has read a great many rooms. This one, she says quietly, arranged itself.
Then the September storm strips the rotten south end of the boardwalk down to its old bones — and gives the Cove back something no one went looking for. Human remains. Eight feet down. In ground nobody has opened since the town paved over it. Within a week, everyone knows whose they are. Within a week, the town has already begun to grieve.
They are not Emily Harrow's.
And Elena — a nurse, a woman who once fled the helplessness of not being able to fix anything — is the one who has to stand up in a room full of mourning people and take their answer away. About a dig the Sand Dollar Detective Club asked for. About someone who has been waiting under that boardwalk for thirty-eight years, hidden rather than lost, and who deserves a name.
Eight women past fifty. A journalist, a retired detective, a forensic tech, a nurse, a teacher, a librarian, a realtor, and the innkeeper who keeps the coffee coming. The police have stopped calling them a nuisance. They haven't started calling them for help, either. The club solves the boardwalk murder anyway — and closes the book holding a question that is so much worse than the one they started with.
If that isn't Emily under the boardwalk, then who is? And where, after thirty-eight years, is she?
Secrets Beneath the Boardwalk is the third novel in The Sand Dollar Detective Club — a warm, witty, fair-play mystery series for readers of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, Elin Hilderbrand, and Louise Penny. Every book solves its own case completely and can be read on its own. Together, they unravel the one secret this town would do anything to keep buried.
These are gentle books about hard things. No gore, no grimdark, no cliffhanger on the case — but these women are past fifty, every one of them has lost somebody, and the story knows it. Expect a puzzle you can solve, a town you'll want to move to, and at least one scene that costs you something.
Perfect for readers who love:
- Coastal mysteries and small-town secrets, with real emotional weight
Strong female friendships and found family — eight women, eight histories
Fair-play puzzles you can solve alongside the characters
Clean mysteries: no gore, no gratuitous violence, no cynicism
Character-driven crime fiction, where the people matter as much as the case
A long-running series with a secret that unspools across every book
Genre: Mystery
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