Murder on Driftwood Beach: A Small-Town Coastal Mystery (The Sand Dollar Detective Club Book 1) by Marin Wilder

She thought she'd buried her old life. Then she turned the photograph over.Six months after her divorce, former investigative journalist Julia Mercer comes to Sand Dollar Cove to disappear—to drink her coffee on the sand at dawn, to stop being the woman who couldn't let anything go.The little Cape Cod beach town is exactly what she needs: lighthouse and dune grass, a café that knows your order, and seven women past fifty who pull an eighth chair into their morning circle as if they'd been saving it for her.Then a body washes up on Driftwood Beach, and the town agrees a little too quickly that it was an accident.Julia knows the shape of a story someone wants buried—and she isn't the only one.A retired detective. A forensic tech. A nurse.

A teacher. A librarian. A realtor. An innkeeper.

And Julia, who spent a career asking questions people didn't want answered.Eight women. Eight lifetimes of expertise. Not one of them able to look away.The police call them a nuisance.The town calls them the Sand Dollar Detective Club.Julia came to Sand Dollar Cove to stop being the woman who couldn't let anything go.

She is about to discover that she was never going to manage it—and that this might be the first time it saves somebody.Because the dead man isn't the only mystery waiting for them.A photograph surfaces where it never should have been. On the back, three words are written in a missing woman's own hand:Don't trust him.Her name was Emily Harrow.She vanished thirty-eight years ago.And Sand Dollar Cove has been keeping her secret ever since.Murder on Driftwood Beach is the first novel in The Sand Dollar Detective Club, a warm, witty, fair-play coastal mystery series for readers of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, Elin Hilderbrand, and Louise Penny.Every book solves its own mystery completely and can be read on its own. Together, the novels unravel the one secret this town would do anything to keep buried.Expect clever clues, genuine emotional stakes, strong female friendships, and a seaside town you'll want to return to again and again—with no gore, no gratuitous violence, and no cliffhanger on the central mystery.Perfect for readers who love:Coastal mysteries and buried small-town secretsStrong female friendships and found familyOlder protagonists with real lives, losses, and historiesFair-play mysteries you can solve alongside the charactersClean, suspenseful crime fiction without goreCharacter-driven mysteries where the people matter as much as the puzzleA long-running series with a deeper mystery unfolding across every book