Barbara Ross. Clammed Up. Kensington, 2013.

This mystery is set on the Maine coast, where, yes, shellfish, especially clams and lobsters, are harvested. Our narrator, Julia Snowden, is a native of the town of Busman’s Harbor. She worked for a number of years on Wall Street, but has returned home at the age of thirty to help the family’s struggling business, the Snowden Family Clambake.

A clambake, for the uninitiated, is a cookout, usually in a single large pot, of various shellfish, corn cobs, potatoes, spices, and eggs. Julia’s mother’s family owned a small offshore island with a large mansion, so the Snowden Family Clambakes not only have a meal, but a boat trip to a private island as well. Due in part to a slow economy and in part to mismanagement by Julia’s brother-in-law Sonny, the bank is on the verge of making the family sell off everything, including the family island.

For the very first clambake of the season in June, the Snowden Family Clambake is hosting a wedding party. The bride is a casual acquaintance of Julia’s from New York. During the picnic, Julia and one of her customers discover the body of the best man hanging inside the main entrance of the family mansion. No one has lived in the house for years, but they have kept up the place enough for the ambience. Julia even upgraded some electrical wiring in the spring so parties could have a place to spruce up before an event like a wedding.

That is the mystery. At first it appears that best man Ray Wilson got drunk and simply missed the boat to the island. The question becomes, then, not only who killed him (it is clearly not suicide as his shirt is blood-spattered) but how did he get to the island?

There is a deadline of sorts because the usurious banker who keeps texting Julia reminds her that the business plan calls for five off days all season. That would be the average for bad weather days. But before the week is out, they already had to close the island for four days because it was a crime scene. It is open for one day, but then the porch to the mansion burns, making it a crime scene once again, this time for arson.

There are a whole list of characters involved. Though the victim and the bridegroom were best friends from kindergarten, Ray was not especially popular. He had become an alcoholic, and it was pretty clear he had been drinking hard the night before the wedding.

One of the bridesmaids claims that the bride really loved Ray more than her fiancé. The local taxi driver, a guy that Julia has had a crush on since the seventh grade, took Ray back to his hotel, but Ray never returned to his hotel room. Julia’s sister Livvy (Sonny’s wife) has a good friend Sarah, a single mother schoolteacher who also seems to have a connection of some kind with Ray.

The caretakers on the island, a couple Julia has known all her life, claim that they heard or saw nothing the night before the murder. There is a small beach apart from the boat dock. It is feasible that someone could have brought Ray ashore from there. But why kill him and then hang him? Was it to send a message to someone?

As is so often the case with such mysteries, nearly everyone is a suspect, and things are not at all as they first seemed to Julia. Although Julia does become our crime solver, the police here are doing a good job in their investigation. Indeed, one of the policemen has carried the torch for Julia for years just as she carried one for the taxi driver.

And it is a small enough town that everyone knows everyone else—except for maybe Quentin, the scion of a prominent family who has done his best to be anonymous but manages to drop some hints to Julia about what is really going on. Gus, the proprietor of a popular eatery for locals, also overhears a lot.

Clammed Up is a complicated mystery that will keep the reader guessing. It might not be a bad idea to keep a list of characters. It is fun.

The main character is a single woman around thirty, so this has a potential for being chick lit, but it is not—at least not until the very last page.

Clammed Up also has a few distinctive recipes. The clam chowder is authentic. The rhubarb coffee cake sounds like it is worth trying. I had to chuckle over the variety of names that New Englanders give to a certain blueberry dessert similar to an apple crisp: blueberry duff, blueberry grunt, blueberry slump, blueberry crunch, blueberry crisp, or blueberry dump. My Vermont mother called it blueberry buckle, but it basically the same dessert.