Phyllis H Moore

Pelican Beach Murder Phyllis H Moore

Jealousies and a body wash ashore during a summer retreat on the beach. Meg and Tom Richards negotiate a house trade for the summer. She will get a beach cottage on Galveston Island facing the Gulf of Mexico, and Tom will house sit for her while he wraps up the Hillard case from A Dickens of a Crime. What begins as a relaxing get away, becomes more complicated as Meg meets a family of locals with a troubled past. Her closest temporary neighbor, Echo Charles is quirky and mysterious and, Meg decides, irritating.

Although Meg enjoys a visit from her best friend, Jean, and their outings on the island, she is distracted by her thoughts about her own mother's past, a history Meg knows nothing about. As she anticipates the birth of her first grandchild, she mourns the absence of her own maternal grandmother. She wants to make memories for Dorie's and Michael's child, but she realizes she's missed half of her own heritage and will have nothing to pass on from her mother's side of the family.

The relationships she discovers during her beach stay remind her of the dysfunction and exploitation of the Hillard twins in her own hometown. The personalities and their consequences strike a familiar chord for Meg and she's alert to every nuance in her conversations with the locals. It will be her ability to form relationships and follow her intuition that will help Meg flesh out the murderer, and again, it will disappoint her to know the consequences of neglected relationships.

Scenic, historic Galveston Island, Texas is the setting for a cozy mystery reminiscent of the best in amateur sleuthing. This story will set the stage for Meg's next adventure and road trip to discover mysteries from her own family's history.