The Off Season

Havener Island is supposed to grow quieter after summer. This year, the silence is hiding something. When the seasonal visitors leave, Stell Havener expects the island to settle back into its familiar off-season rhythm. Instead, one house stays closed too long. Frances Holt had told everyone she planned to winter on Havener. She filled her oil tanks, ordered storm windows, and prepared for the cold. Then she disappeared. Weeks later, Fran is found dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs inside a house that has been carefully shut down for winter. The authorities see a tragic accident. Stell and Lin Stanley see something else. A woman planning to stay would not have drained her pipes and shuttered her house. And someone who truly left the island should have appeared in Lin's boat records. As Stell follows unpaid accounts, heating records, old resentments, and the quiet habits of people who make their living caring for empty summer homes, the mystery tightens around the handful of residents who remained behind after everyone else went away. On Havener Island, the off-season is when the island stops performing for outsiders. It is also when there is nowhere left for a killer to hide. The Off Season is Book 2 in the Havener Island Mysteries, an atmospheric coastal cozy mystery about secrets, isolation, loyalty, and the truths that become visible only after everyone else has gone home.