A Merry Folger Nantucket Mystery Series

No-nonsense Nantucket detective Merry Folger grapples with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and two murders as the island is overtaken by Hollywood stars and DC suits.

Nantucket Police Chief Meredith Folger is acutely conscious of the stress COVID-19 has placed on the community she loves. Although the island has proved a refuge for many during the pandemic, the cost to Nantucket has been high. Merry hopes that the Christmas Stroll, one of Nantucket’s favorite traditions, in which Main Street is transformed into a winter wonderland, will lift the island’s spirits. But the arrival of a large-scale TV production, and the Secretary of State and her family, complicates matters significantly.
 
The TV shoot is plagued with problems from within, as a shady, power-hungry producer clashes with strong-willed actors. Across Nantucket, the Secretary’s troubled stepson keeps shaking off his security detail to visit a dilapidated house near conservation land, where an intriguing recluse guards secrets of her own. With all parties overly conscious of spending too much time in the public eye and secrets swirling around both camps, it is difficult to parse what behavior is suspicious or not—until the bodies turn up.
 
Now, it’s up to Merry and Detective Howie Seitz to find a connection between two seemingly unconnected murders and catch the killer. But when everyone has a motive, and half of the suspects are politicians and actors, how can Merry and Howie tell fact from fiction?
 
This latest installment in critically acclaimed author Francine Mathews’s Merry Folger series is an immersive escape to festive Nantucket, a poignant exploration of grief as a result of parental absence, and a delicious new mystery to keep you guessing.

In the Category 3 winds of a late-season hurricane, Nantucket police detective Merry Folger and her team attempt a rescue off the secluded island of Tuckernuck—only to discover a deadly secret.
 
As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from a stubborn elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback. But as the storm surge rises and the surf warnings mount, Dionis has to make a choice: abandon whatever—or whoever—was left behind, or risk her own life by plunging back into the maelstrom. Even she has no idea what evil the hurricane is sheltering.
 
When the coast guard notifies the Nantucket police of a luxury yacht grounded in the shoals off Tuckernuck’s northern edge—with two shooting victims lying in the main cabin—detective Meredith Folger throws herself into an investigation before the hurricane sweeps all crime-scene evidence out to sea. Merry is supposed to be on leave this weekend, dancing at her own wedding, but the Cat 3 has thrown her blissful plans into chaos. As her battered house fills with stranded wedding guests and flood waters rise all over Nantucket Island, Merry has her own choice to make: How much should she risk in order to bring a criminal to justice?

​Francine Mathews’ no-nonsense Nantucket police detective, Merry Folger, is back on the case after nineteen years. ​Death on Nantucket, the fifth Merry Folger Mystery, is full of regional charm, a strong sense of local history, and foggy New England Island atmosphere. 

Spencer Murphy is a national treasure. A famous Vietnam War correspondent who escaped captivity in Southeast Asia, he made a fortune off of his books and television appearances. But Spence is growing forgetful with age; he’s started to wander and even fails to come home one night. When a body is discovered at Step Above, the sprawling Murphy house near Steps Beach, Nantucket police detective Meredith Folger is called in to investigate.

The timing couldn’t be worse: It’s the Fourth of July, and tourists are arriving in droves to celebrate on Nantucket’s beaches, so the police force is spread thin. On top of that Merry is planning her wedding to cranberry farmer Peter Mason, and her new boss, an ex-Chicago police chief with an aggressive management strategy, seems to be trying to force her to quit. Merry can’t conclude the Murphy investigation quickly enough for him. As she grapples with a family of unreliable storytellers—some incapable of recalling the past, and others determined that it never be known—she suspects that the truth may be forever out of reach, trapped in the failing brain of a man whose whole life may be a lie.

The fourth Merry Folger nantucket mystery
 
After a trying case, detective Merry Folger begrudgingly agrees to take a leave from work to meet her fussy future in-laws in Greenwich, but it isn’t long before she is summoned back to Nantucket. The body of a 21-year-old was discovered in the frigid waters of the Sound in the days leading up to the annual Christmas celebration, and the death isn’t sitting well with Merry’s father, the local police chief, who fears the track marks on the victim’s arms may be indicative of a growing drug problem on the island. Feeling a constant need to live up to her father’s expectations, Merry rushes home to her fiancé, Peter’s, annoyance, only to find that heroin isn’t the only destructive force in Nantucket.
 
Soon after Merry arrives, she feels stonewalled by her father. If he was so desperate for her help, why won’t he share the details of the case with her? What is he hiding? For the first time, Merry fears she cannot trust her lifelong role model—her own father—let alone figure out why a young athlete and Harvard scholar ended up dead in the frigid, storm-churned Sound.

The third Merry Folger Nantucket mystery

Word travels fast in Nantucket when two children and their dog discover a skeleton in the dunes of the cold Sconset beach. Could the dead woman be the latest victim of the serial killer who has been terrorizing mainland Massachusetts? The FBI seems to think so and sends their forensic psychiatrist to the scene. But Police Detective Merry Folger has her own suspicions, and starts looking into a cold case that has long baffled Nantucket police: the disappearance of a beautiful Harvard-educated psychiatrist seven years ago. When Merry starts inquiring into the tenuous leads in that long-cold case, she stumbles into a web of violent passions and buried crimes, a web that continues to ensnare victims. Two more women are murdered, giving fuel to the FBI’s quest for a serial killer. But Merry, well-aware of the tangled histories of some of the island’s longtime residents, is convinced the only way forward is digging deeper into the past.

Fresh from her first murder case, Nantucket detective Merry Folger is unwillingly sucked into her second.

When Joe Duarte, a fishing boat captain with decades of experience on the wild seas off Nantucket, is swept overboard during a spring storm, his death is pronounced accidental. But his estranged daughter, Del, is convinced it’s murder. She moves back to Nantucket to get closer to the truth, and enlists her old friend, detective Merry Folger, to help. But Del is also hiding secrets of her own, and the police are not inclined to help her with what they see as a wild goose chase. Merry has to defy her boss—her father—in order to investigate.

The first Merry Folger Nantucket mystery

When Rusty Mason, scion of one of Nantucket’s oldest and wealthiest families, is found dead in a flooded cranberry bog one foggy fall night, thirty-two-year-old detective Merry Folger is faced with her first murder case. Merry is the daughter of the local police chief and granddaughter of his predecessor; her father is a strict boss and Merry feels pressure to go the extra mile to prove her promotion to detective isn’t just nepotism. But the Mason murder is a demanding first test. Merry’s investigation brings to light all the tensions that plague the tiny community of Nantucket: the decades-old grudges, the skyrocketing real estate that only wealthy weekenders can afford, the resentments of the old Nantucket families who are barely keeping their homes and heritage fishing businesses alive. But Merry knows the island and its politics in a way only a local can.