Death in a Cold Hard Light

"After a trying case, Merry begrudgingly agrees to take a leave from work to meet her fussy future in-laws in Greenwich, but it isn't long before she is summoned back to Nantucket. The body of a young man was discovered in the Sound the weekend of the annual Christmas Stroll. Although a simple drowning is suspected--the water is hardly above freezing, after all--the death isn't sitting well with Merry's father, the local police chief, who fears the track marks on the victim's arm reveal a growing drug problem on the island. Feeling a constant need to live up to her father's expectations no matter the cost, Merry rushes home, only to find that heroin isn't the only dark cloud above Nantucket. Matt Bailey, another member of the force and the father of a young child, has gone missing. Strangely, no one seems to be concerned. Merry can't get more than a few words out of her father on either of the cases. If the chief wanted her help so badly, why isn't he telling her any of the facts? And why is Bailey's office, normally a mess of papers and dirty dishes, suddenly so clean? Her father might not be talking, but Merry is determined to get some answers, and to prove to her fiancâe that her sudden departure from Greenwich wasn't for no reason"--

Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, New York, the last of six girls. She attended Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Since then, she has written twenty-five books, including four other novels in the Merry Folger series (Death in the Off-Season, Death in Rough Water, Death in a Mood Indigo, and Death on Nantucket) as well as the nationally bestselling Being a Jane Austen mystery series, which she writes under the penname Stephanie Barron. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.