Come Shell or High Water (A Haunted Shell Shop Mystery #1) by Molly MacRae #bookreview #mystery #paranormal #ghosts
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Title: Come Shell or High Water
Author: Molly MacRae
Publisher: Kensington Cozies
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Page Count: 302
My rating: 2 1/2 stars
About the book:
When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .
As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger—the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .
In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.
Come Shell or High Water by Molly MacRae is the first book in the new paranormal cozy A Haunted Shell Shop Mystery series. As with most cozy mystery series the A Haunted Shell Shop Mystery will feature a new mystery to be solved in each book so they can be read as a standalone if choosing to do so. Of course there will be some character development carrying over from book to book for those who follow from the beginning.
Maureen Nash was recently widowed and is retired from her job as a malacologist, someone who studies mussels, and is also a folklorist weaving stories. When Maureen received letters address to her former husband from a man who owns The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina she can’t help but be curious and decides to visit the Island but just happens to arrive right after a hurricane has passed.
What Maureen didn’t expect to find on the Island was a dead body as soon as she arrived and when it’s found to be the very man she came to see she becomes a suspect looking to clear her name and with the help from some new friends and a ghost she finds on the island Maureen vows to find the murderer herself.
I am normally a huge fan of books that cross over genres with being someone who likes to read a lot of different genres myself so Come Shell or High Water by Molly MacRae seemed to be right up my alley. Unfortunately though this one got off to a very rocky and dare I say confusing start for me so I found myself trying to keep up. It sort of dumps a reader in but also then switches back and forth between different things in the beginning so it was hard to get hooked into the story. Probably not a series I will return to myself but others did enjoy this one more than I did so if you like a cozy with some paranormal and a lot of quirkiness this may be for you.
I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.
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About the author:
Molly MacRae writes the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, about four women who reinvent their lives when they buy a bookshop in Inversgail on the west coast of Scotland, and the award-winning Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries, about a textile preservation specialist in Blue Plum, Tennessee, who ends up with a depressed ghost on her hands.
Molly spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northeast Tennessee, where she managed the Book Place, an independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was the curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine for more than twenty years, and she won the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Molly lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she connects children with books at the public library.
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