Perfect Couple

The Otis-Winbury wedding is set for the Fourth of July weekend on Nantucket: a tented reception on the water, a bride whose parents are out of their depth among the groom's moneyed family, and a guest list full of people keeping something back. On the morning of the wedding, the maid of honor is found dead in the harbor.

Chief of Police Ed Kapenash and the state police work through a house full of suspects, while the novel moves back through the year that led here — the engagement, the families' uneasy alliance, the affairs and debts and quiet resentments that nobody meant to bring to the island.

Hilderbrand's turn toward mystery keeps the beach-read texture — the food, the houses, the summer people — but hangs it on a police investigation in which almost every character has a plausible reason to lie.