The Summer Guests

The Summer Guests is the second book in Tess Gerritsen's Martini Club series, set in Purity, Maine, where a group of retired intelligence officers meet for drinks and cannot quite stop noticing things. When a teenage girl goes missing, the town's quiet season fractures, and the search draws in the wealthy seasonal residents whose houses sit above the year-round community.

Maggie Bird, ex-CIA and now keeping chickens, is joined by her former colleagues as the official investigation runs into the money, lawyers and reputations that summer brings. Their tradecraft is decades out of date but their instincts are not, and the case turns on the difference between what the town's two populations are willing to say out loud.

Gerritsen keeps the tone dry and character-led, closer to a village mystery than to the espionage novels the Martini Club's members retired from, with a plot that stays firmly domestic in scale.