Description:
During Nantucket's annual Christmas Stroll, the island's shop windows are filled with quaint wool blankets and antique barometers in an attempt to add some holiday cheer (and tourist dollars) to the area by encouraging wealthy mainlanders out to the island. But when a boatload of tourists rolls by a floating corpse on the way into town, it puts an inevitable damper on the festivities. The drowned body turns out to be that of a young Harvard scholar-turned-scalloper with needle marks in his arm, and Merry is called home from vacation by her father, police chief John Folger, to investigate the drug-induced accident. Investigate an accident? Merry decides her father must know more than he's telling and, with a quick stop at the morgue, her hunch is confirmed. How did her father know to look for the pinprick-sized needle marks in the man's upper arm? Why did her father so confidently mention heroin as the cause of death when the patient's autopsy suggests otherwise: the pupil in his one remaining eye is dilated rather than constricted, the usual sign of heroin use. Merry's fully aware of her precarious situation. By solving the case, she'll most likely uncover the damaging evidence that her father's withholding; by failing to solve it, she'll lose her father's professional respect, which Merry's afraid she may have already lost after having botched her last homicide case. But she can't stop puzzling over one question: Why would a man with something to hide want his own daughter to investigate the case? Mathews has used the Nantucket backdrop to full effect; the island's raw, blustery weather sets an eerie scene, whether it's during a young woman's phone call to her dead friend or when two teenagers dredge up scallops and some revealing jetsam. Mathews may have tried to cover too much ground in Death in a Cold Hard Light, bringing Merry's professional credibility as well as her relationship with her father and her soon-to-be fiancé into the picture, but the book is at its most intriguing when it focuses on the puzzling case itself. --Kris Law
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