The Well at Nassau

Nassau glitters like paradise but paradise has always contained a serpent — seven years ago a copper king was murdered in his bedroom at a great white villa, there was a fire, a skull wound, a trial that satisfied no one, and the island chose silence; now an American journalist named Eleanor Armitage has crossed an ocean to ask the questions Nassau wants buried, carrying a notebook, a newspaper cutting, and the name of a man who lied at trial, and when she arranges a meeting near Fort Montagu with a stranger who promises proof she does not return; as the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion follow a mismatched pair of gloves, a lipstick warning scrawled on a mirror, a laundry woman who noticed what the police ignored, and the quiet fury of a man who killed not for money but because the woman he loved was about to be called a murderess, they uncover a murder built not on greed but on vanity dressed as devotion; inspired by the unsolved murders of Sir Harry Oakes (1943) and Betty Renner (1950) in Nassau while remaining entirely fictional, The Well at Nassau is an original Golden Age–style mystery about colonial secrets, old lies dressed as loyalty, and the discovery that the most dangerous thing on a beautiful island is a truth someone has spent seven years learning to live without.