THE CASTAWAYS
By Elin Hilderbrand
(Little Brown: $24.99)
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Reviewed by: Patricia Ann Jones

Tiny Nantucket Island is a place largely unchanged since 1845, with its cobblestone streets, whaling captains' homes with widow walks and cedar shingles. "The storefronts, the churches, the banks, the Pacific Club at the bottom of Main street, were all as they had been a hundred and fifty years ago." It is here, to Nantucket, that four couples who called themselves The Castaways, had settled. They came from different places, different lifestyles, and found each other.

The Castaways is an exploration of the boundaries of friendship and forgiveness.

The MacAvoys, Kapenashes, Drakes, and Wheelers, for years, have vacationed together, celebrated together, confided in and depended on one another. They've endured many sad times and happy times, and even worked their way through Greg Mavoy's rumored affair with his beautiful student, April Peak. Was it rumor or truth? After all Greg, handsome, musically gifted, a great teacher might have been tempted. Will they ever know the truth now?

Ed Kapenash, Chief of Nantucket's Police Department got the word first. There's been a sailing accident, a couple drowned on their way to the Vineyard. Ed got the word from one of his own men who had learned it from the Coastguard. It couldn't have been Tess and Greg MacAvoy who had drowned. Not Tess, Andrea's beloved cousin. Andrea is Ed's wife and she's looked after Tess for most of her life. Not Greg, not Ed's closest and dearest friend, a man as close as a brother. They'd left that morning to sail for an overnight stay on the nearby Vineyard. It's their wedding anniversary. But there's no mistake. Tess and Greg are dead, why, how? Was it really an accident? Was it . . . murder and suicide?

The question lies heavy on the six friends' hearts . . . Upended by grief and denial they set out to solve the mystery. Each feels a sense of responsibility for the deaths of their dear friends.

Hilderbrand, author of The Castaways lives on Nantucket, which has been the setting for her seven previous novels. She introduces her characters complete with backgrounds, intimate details of their lives today, what makes them tick, cry, laugh, and harbor secrets that might possibly destroy the long-standing bonds forged over the years.

As Hilderbrand introduces Jeffery and Delilah Drake, Ed and Andrea Kapenash, Phoebe and Addison Wheeler, and Tess and Greg MacAvoy I felt amazed at her ability to make these story people so real that their various guilts, suspicions, self-doubts and personal turmoils suddenly became my own. Their pain reaches out from the pages and draws the reader deeper and deeper into the story. Don't be too surprised as you begin this page-turning story of passion and suspense that you simply cannot find a stopping place.