Dig Deeper

Thirty-six New York Times bestsellers to his name, a sprawling estate in Brighton Shore, Prince Edward Island, and then a sudden, echoing absence. Raymond Connelly is simply gone. His live-in assistant maintains a tidy narrative. She claims Raymond departed for California, summoned by a television producer eager to adapt his prose for film. Yet in Redondo Beach, his brother John faces weeks of unyielding silence. In Los Angeles, his publisher encounters only dead air.

The Charlottetown Police start a missing persons investigation, but it is a perfunctory gesture. With no bloodstains or broken glass and placated by the assistant's itinerary, they close the file.

John cannot rest in that official quiet. He launches a relentless campaign of phone calls back to the island. During a desperate inquiry at Raymond's parish, Father MacEachern offers a different lifeline. He directs John to Joe MacGregor, a former RCMP officer now based in Cary, North Carolina. Joe knows Charlottetown with the devastating precision reserved for places that have cost you everything.

Joe needs a few details to recognize his next haunting. He takes the case. What he unearths along the manicured, silent streets of Brighton Shore and the whispers he coaxes from a watchful neighbor force him to surface secrets long buried. Raymond Connelly spent forty years writing about the perfect crime. Someone on the island was paying attention.