A Trip to Newport, Scene of the Crimes in TIP OF A BONE

Yesterday, you met my Dream Cast for Tip of a Bone - The Movie (HERE). Today I present the setting. Welcome to the peaceful, touristy town of Newport, population 10,000 and change (but that‘s about to decline). Dire doings are afoot.

The city fathers (and mothers) want you to see the town like this, an idyllic hamlet by the sea. Maya Rivers would like to see it that way, too, but doesn’t get much chance.

She’s too busy working at the fictional Clam Strip, a seafood dive considerably less appealing than this real-life joint. 

Meanwhile, environmental activist Sara Blessing is busy finding a mysterious bone at a woodland construction site, after which she promptly - and mysteriously - goes missing.

Maya’s brother Harley (from whom she’s been separated dang near since birth) is also an activist, and card-carrying member of the Coast Defenders. When we first meet him, he and his playmates are playing dead in the middle of town. 

Harley rises from the dead long enough to meet Maya for dinner across the majestic Newport Bridge . . . 

. . . at the Rogue Brewery tasting room, where she learns he plans to propose to her best friend Allison, and has a mysterious business meeting somewhere at midnight. 

Next morning, Maya learns Harley has been blamed for burning down a building on the Bayfront, ground zero for the town’s tourist industry. Her brother is now deemed a terrorist.

Maya heads out the narrow, winding road to Allison’s place, barely surviving a duel with a mysterious pickup truck.

At Allison’s creepy bungalow in nearby Toledo, Oregon (can you see the dead squirrel on the porch?), Maya learns Allison has been receiving threats, and finds a mysterious bone (see construction site, above) in a box of Harley’s belongings. 

She then visits the headquarters of the Coast Defenders, seeking their help, and is pretty much told to go jump in a (no doubt polluted) lake.

While most of the Defenders are hostile, one is so friendly that Maya takes him back to her apartment, where she suffers a shocking case of coitus-interruptus.

There’s more, of course, as Maya struggles to uncover the truth about the threats, the fire, the disappearance of Sara Blessing, the strange behavior of the Coast Defenders, the suspicious behavior of her boss, and most of all the mystery of that danged bone. Is it human? Is it inhuman? How did her brother get it? And who finds it so threatening that it becomes a motive for murder?

The answers to these and many more questions are revealed in . . . Tip of a Bone.

            Trade paperback         eBook