I received this book from Family Christian to review and offer my honest and unbiased thoughts and opinions about this book. All thoughts expressed are my own.
“There’s been a murder. Some man just threw a woman over the cliff. I saw the whole thing.”
Once I picked up “The Inn at Ocean’s Edge” written by Colleen Coble, I had a hard time putting it down. It’s full of intrigue and suspense, mystery and conspiracy, and…love. Claire Dellamare innocently returns to Hotel Tourmaline to help her father with a business deal. What she doesn’t discover until later, is that this is indeed her return to this place. She never knew she’d already been there. Her parents along with many other folks on the island of Folly Shoals, Maine, have successfully kept the secret from Claire that on her fourth birthday in 1989 she vanished from the hotel during her birthday party.
She was lost to them for one year when Claire mysteriously reappeared in the same garden she disappeared from, weeping, with a note attached stating her name, and no memory of what had happened the previous year. Over time, she had forgotten she had even gone missing or had ever been to Folly Shoals…until this return.
Claire unwittingly stumbles upon Meg and Luke Rocco, brother and sister natives and current residents of Folly Shoals, whose mother disappeared 25 years earlier, the same night Claire was taken. While walking along the cliffs overlooking the water, trying to clear her head and make sense of what she’d just learned, Claire witnesses a man push a woman off the cliff to her death. The man renders Claire unconscious and removes the body before the sheriff arrives, leaving Claire even more confused and now…frightened. The man wasn’t just any man: he was the nameless, unexplained man who haunted her nightmares.
You simply must read the rest to find out what happens. The payoff is big. It’s a wonderful, clean, quality, exciting book, and I count it a blessing to have been able to read and write about this book. You’ll want to find out what happens to Claire. Who is the murderous man? What really happened to Meg and Luke’s mother? How do she and Claire connect?
