The Storm Watch Murder
(2026)(The sixth book in the Sand Dollar Detective series)
A novel by Marin Wilder
For six years he told the whole town his marina had been stolen from him. Now he is dead in its boatyard, in the middle of a February gale, and the town already knows why.Grant Kellerman and Pete Dorsey bought Storm Watch Marina together when they were both young enough for it to be a mad thing to do.
Six years ago Kellerman came out of it with a check and no marina, and he has spent every day since making sure nobody in Sand Dollar Cove forgot it.
On the Monday morning after the worst gale of the winter, with the causeway shut and every light at the marina burning, he is found dead in the yard he swore had been taken from him.
It takes the town about ninety minutes to stop asking who.
Olivia Hart has sold this town’s houses for forty-one years and knows exactly who owns what. The disputed ownership is real. The buried debts are real. The forged paper is real, and she can prove every one of them.
Proving it is the easy part. Whether any of it is why he died is another matter.
Her son has taken a job in Denver and flies on the eleventh of March, and the Sunday-at-four telephone call she has built her week around for years is about to become something else.
Then, forty years deep in the county registry, she turns up a deed she cannot make sense of at all: Emily Harrow’s signature, moving a piece of land on Quarry Lane out of her name for twenty-two thousand dollars — dated two days after the night she disappeared.
Somebody signed that. Somebody witnessed it. Somebody filed it.
A teacher. A journalist. A retired detective. A nurse. A librarian. A forensic tech. A realtor. An innkeeper.
Eight women, a boatyard with a man living in it, a fuel pump that has been keeping its own record since 2016 and that nobody thought about, and a question Sand Dollar Cove has spent thirty-eight years refusing to ask out loud.
The Storm Watch Murder is the sixth 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, and a seaside town you’ll want to return to again and again—with no gore, no gratuitous violence, and no cliffhanger on the central mystery.
Six years ago Kellerman came out of it with a check and no marina, and he has spent every day since making sure nobody in Sand Dollar Cove forgot it.
On the Monday morning after the worst gale of the winter, with the causeway shut and every light at the marina burning, he is found dead in the yard he swore had been taken from him.
It takes the town about ninety minutes to stop asking who.
Olivia Hart has sold this town’s houses for forty-one years and knows exactly who owns what. The disputed ownership is real. The buried debts are real. The forged paper is real, and she can prove every one of them.
Proving it is the easy part. Whether any of it is why he died is another matter.
Her son has taken a job in Denver and flies on the eleventh of March, and the Sunday-at-four telephone call she has built her week around for years is about to become something else.
Then, forty years deep in the county registry, she turns up a deed she cannot make sense of at all: Emily Harrow’s signature, moving a piece of land on Quarry Lane out of her name for twenty-two thousand dollars — dated two days after the night she disappeared.
Somebody signed that. Somebody witnessed it. Somebody filed it.
A teacher. A journalist. A retired detective. A nurse. A librarian. A forensic tech. A realtor. An innkeeper.
Eight women, a boatyard with a man living in it, a fuel pump that has been keeping its own record since 2016 and that nobody thought about, and a question Sand Dollar Cove has spent thirty-eight years refusing to ask out loud.
The Storm Watch Murder is the sixth 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, and a seaside town you’ll want to return to again and again—with no gore, no gratuitous violence, 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
A mother learning how to let a grown son go
Clean, suspenseful crime fiction without gore
A long-running series with a deeper mystery unfolding across every book
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Marin Wilder's The Storm Watch Murder