Old friends are the best friends. Sophie Singletary had heard this adage all her life, and now she was going to test its soundness. After ten years of marriage to a controlling, belligerent man, Sophie finally garnered the nerve to divorce Andrew Temple. With some trepidation, Sophie moved back to her hometown and into an old Victorian house she’d inherited from her grandmother. Seaboard was a small, quiet town in eastern North Carolina, and although Sophie no longer had family there, she had lots of old friends. Yet she wondered how well she really knew these people she hadn’t seen in 15 years. But when she reconnected with girlfriends Jan and Julie, she realized immediately her fears were groundless. Miles and years of separation had done nothing to compromise the close bond they’d formed in childhood. Jan still spoke in a pronounced eastern North Carolina accent well suited for the wit and common-sense advice she spouted so freely, and Julie still prattled on mindlessly, feigning knowledge of any topic being discussed. So Jan and Julie proved to be the supportive friends Sophie remembered. Then Sophie encountered her first love, the inscrutable Jeff Sands turned US Marshal. Jeff could be witty, then grimA[a–A]gentle, then toughA[a–A]charming, then rude. Although Sophie found Jeff’s mercurial behavior maddening, the attraction was still there. Suddenly life in quiet Seaboard was thrown into turmoil. The unimaginable occurred. Bodies began turning up, and US Marshall Jeff Sands found himself in the middle of a deadly game masterminded by an international criminal.