An amateur-detective novel set on the North Carolina Outer Banks: a weight lifting, Harley-riding landlady discovers a body on the beach and begins her investigation.
All Jules Cogan Fiore wants is to collect the rent. That and make the mortgage payments on the ten rental properties she owns and manages on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And pay for the upkeep on her Harley-Davidson motorcycle and her Irish wolfhound, Finn. Forty-five years old, unattached except to two grown sons, she's a body-builder living the good life at the beach. But when Jules finds one tenant's girlfriend, Gloria, with tears in her eyes and a grocery sack of crumpled dollar bills, she knows this transaction will be more difficult than usual. And then there's the body on the beach-the dead body of her tenant and friend, Mark. Jules runs headlong into a police department that wants to close the case as quickly as possible. She persists in her search for the killer and the reasons for Mark's death. She discovers much more: another dead body, the sad details of one young man's life, facts about a cast of characters who are her neighbors at the beach, and the extent of her own unresolved feelings about death.