Shadow's Secret

Shadow's Secret opens Mary Stone's Shadow Island FBI Mystery series, a procedural set on a small, close-knit island community off the Virginia coast. The island's calm surface hides old grievances, and the arrival of a federal investigator forces long-kept secrets into the open.

The book follows the series' familiar shape: a body, a suspect pool of neighbours who have known one another for decades, and an outsider agent whose own past keeps intruding on the work. Stone writes short, propulsive chapters and alternates between the investigation and glimpses of the killer's perspective.

As a first instalment, it establishes the island setting, the working relationships that carry the later books, and the personal history the protagonist is trying to outrun.