By Maggie Blackburn

Summer Merriweather’s career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder’s thread.  Academic life at her Virginia university is a viper’s pit, so Summer spends her summer in England, but her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack.  Returning to Brigid’s island, NC, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to settle the estate, sell her mom’s embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore and go home.  But as she drops by Beach reads, Summer finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: “Sell the bookstore or die.”  Clearly, something is rotten on Brigid’s island.