Thanks for having me back on the blog and in the kitchen, Cloris! Today I’m talking about three things I love—muffins, mysteries, and mollusks. I love islands, too, and those first three things show up on one of my favorite islands, Ocracoke, in Come Shell or High Water, the first book in my new Haunted Shell Shop mystery series.
The book opens at the tail end of a hurricane with Maureen Nash arriving on Ocracoke, a small barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. She arrives with a mystery on her hands—Allen, a guy on the island, has been writing letters to her late husband, Jeff, since shortly before Jeff died. The letters tell Jeff he should come to the island to learn something to his advantage. Gee, not at all scammy-sounding. Another letter arrived a few weeks ago and Maureen plans to nose around Ocracoke Village to see if she can figure out what Allen’s game is.
So where do mollusks come into the picture? So many ways. Mollusks are the animals that make and live in shells—clams, oysters, snails, scallops, conchs, winkles, mussels, etc. Ocracoke Island (a real place) has some of the best shelling beaches in the country. Allen, the scammy letter writer, owns a shell shop on the island. And Maureen is a malacologist—a scientist who studies shells and the creatures who make them. She’s also a storyteller and collects fables and folktales about shells.
Soon after setting foot in Ocracoke Village Maureen rescues a large, fabulous shell from the storm-tossed surf. Then things begin to go haywire. The next thing she knows, she’s waking up on the floor of the shell shop after an incident she can’t remember. She meets Glady and Burt, a pair of squabbling octogenarian siblings, who live across the street from the shell shop. She thinks she might have tripped over a body in the woods. And then she comes eye to eye with the ghost of an eighteenth-century pirate—unless she’s suffering from a concussion.
Operating under these conditions, a woman could use a good muffin. Luckily for Maureen, Burt took up baking during the pandemic and his specialty is muffins. Here he is, now, with a word about his Fig Walnut Spice Muffins and the recipe:
“This is the first muffin recipe I’ve come up with on my own. It makes eighteen muffins. Sometimes seventeen if I’m heavy-handed in filling the muffin cups. When Glady asked if I was ever going to fix the recipe so that it makes a standard dozen, I asked who she was kidding. Seventeen or eighteen muffins is better than a dozen or a baker’s dozen any day. This recipe makes a Burt’s dozen.”
Yield: 18 (or 17)
Ingredients for Large Bowl
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1 cup dried figs, stems removed, chopped into raisin-size pieces (or a little bigger)
1 cup walnuts, chopped
Ingredients for Medium Bowl
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup plain Greek yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 400° F.
If you have two muffin pans (for a total of 24 muffins), butter 18 of the muffin cups or line them with muffin papers. Otherwise, bake 12 muffins and, after the pan cools, prepare 6 of the cups again to bake the final 6 muffins.
In the large mixing bowl, stir together all the ingredients but the figs and walnuts. Then stir in the figs and walnuts.
In the medium bowl, melt the butter, then whisk in the brown sugar, yogurt, vanilla, and the eggs. Pour into the large bowl and stir until just combined. Batter will be thick.
Fill muffin cups about 3/4 full. Bake until toothpick or tester comes out clean, 15–20 minutes.
Remove from oven and turn muffins out of pan to cool on a wire rack.
A Haunted Shell Shop Mystery, Book 1
When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .
As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger—the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .
In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.
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