C.
Hope Clark adores her South Carolina home on the lake, but sometimes it takes a
beach to bring characters to life in her head. Hope is the author of The
Carolina Slade Mysteries as well as the Edisto Island Mysteries. Her latest
release is Edisto Jinx. Learn more about Hope and her books at her website.
The perfect getaway . . . we all dream
about it. The place where nature soothes us like a balm, and nothing is allowed
into our senses but peace and calm. Where we can write great thoughts because
nothing else stands in their way.
To most of us, that means the presence
of water.
The Edisto Island Mystery Series is set
on exquisite and secluded Edisto Island. Located on the very edge of South
Carolina, down long, long Highway 174 that crosses a huge bridge then a smaller
one across the marsh, Edisto Beach faces the Atlantic Ocean with five miles of
beach. Steeped in history, from the extinct Edistow Indians to the Civil War,
this jingle-like area welcomes visitors, but does not welcome development. To
get away, you rent someone’s house, and every single one of them is within
three short, walkable blocks to the waves on one side, or the jaw-dropping
beauty of the marsh. No franchises. No fast food. No pollution of urban light.
Just breezes and a low, sliding roar of waves curling over the sand.
Callie Jean Morgan was a Boston
detective until she finally nabbed a criminal she’d pursued for five years, and
then his family killed her husband. Desperate for revenge, she ruins her
career, and in an effort to salvage her son’s emotional health, she returned to
South Carolina. Her parents give her the keys to the family’s vacation home on
Edisto Beach. Reluctantly she retreats to the house with all its calming
memories, the childhood mentor next door, the healing ebb and flow of the sea.
What a perfect setup. A horribly broken
woman hoping to find herself at a setting everyone views as a generic panacea
to anyone with ills to cure. Then the day she sets foot into that Eden, her
childhood mentor is murdered right under her nose. She is yanked back into a
world of crime, against her best judgment, risking her fragile sanity, only to
also face a world of beachcombers who don’t believe crime happens at the beach.
People who vacation at Edisto Beach
always return. Most wish they lived there. Many scan the blocks for real estate
signs, seeking that special deal, hoping to actually buy a piece of this
treasure where they can one day retire. I own a small piece on one of those
blocks. This is where I go to sigh and settle, think and weave stories. It’s
the consummate setting for a character whose arc takes her from lows to highs
and back down again, in story after story, book after book, as she learns to
fight to make her life perfect, instead of expecting the setting to do it for
her.
Edisto
Jinx
Is it a flesh and blood killer—or restless spirits?
According to Sophie the yoga
mistress, beautiful Edisto Beach becomes a hotbed of troublemaking spirits
every August. But when a visitor dies mysteriously during a beachhouse party,
former big-city detective Callie Morgan and Edisto Beach police chief Mike
Seabrook hunt for motives and suspects among the living. With tourists filling
the beaches and local business owners anxious to squelch rumors of a murderer
on the loose, Callie will need all the help she can get—especially once the
killer’s attention turns toward her.
