Murder disrupts a beautiful beach island vacation, where Julie St. John, a New York gallery curator, and her ten-year-old son, Alex, have rented a summer house belonging to an eccentric gothic mystery writer, Chester Scates, and his wife, Sara, an artist with a roving eye. Julie and Alex make friends with Fred Dumas, a hippie sculptor of beach souvenirs, and his son Joey, and are soon caught up in old and new love triangles and plots of revenge for the lost village of Beachplum Cove, a magical place once peopled with artists and writers, rock stars, counter-culture dropouts, composers and clammers, who were drawn to the free-spirited lifestyle of a town that was doomed when the island was declared a National Seashore. They knew the village would remain only ten years but they could not bear to let go, and they stayed to the end. When the houses were finally torn down and replaced by a ranger station and campground, many of Beachplum Cove's residents, including Fred and Chester, moved to the nearby town of Ocean View. In Ocean View Julie also makes friends with Craig Benedict, a wealthy art collector, and his son, Mark, a part-time carpenter and full-time perpetual adolescent windsurfer who woos Julie while teaching her to windsurf. When a body is found in the woods near the dunes, clues and motives come to the surface that point to some of Julie and Alex's new friends: any one of them might be the killer.