The Newcomer by Mary Kay Andrews is thirty-something Scarlett Carnahan who discovers her sister’s dead body in an apartment in New York and grabs her four-year-old niece and heads for a motel on the beach on Treasure Island in Florida. She’s sure Tanya’s lover Evan killed Tanya although the newspapers are reporting that Letty herself killed her sister then vanished with her niece.
Turns out Tanya was afraid of what Evan
might do and told Letty that if something happened to her, take little Maya and
run. She even had a bag hidden for Letty to take with her that contained money
and an expensive diamond ring.
On Treasure Island, Letty practically begs
for a room at the Murmuring Surf Motel although the sign says “No Vacancy.” But
owner Ava has a tender heart and allows Letty to clean out the storage unit
then she and Maya can stay there. Ava’s son Joe is a police officer, and he
starts digging into Letty’s background.
The regulars at the Surf are upset that
not only has Ava rented to a young person when they consider the motel as a winter
respite for seniors but Letty is also someone with a child. As Letty tries to figure
out what to do next, she finds she is only a few steps ahead of Evan who has
hired someone to make Letty vanish and bring Maya back home to him.
As Joe gets closer and closer to the
truth, he finds he has a soft spot for Letty and refuses to believe she could
have killed anyone. But when the FBI comes calling, he finds his failure to
turn Letty in could have severe repercussions.
Only someone as skilled as Mary Kay Andrews,
the Queen of Summer Reads, could write a believable way through this precarious
situation. Andrews, a pseudonym for Kathy Hogan Trocheck, is definitely one of
my go-to authors for beach reads. A former journalist, she is based in Atlanta
with her own hideaway on Tybee Island.
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