Swan Song

There is a particular kind of Nantucket money that arrives by ferry with matching luggage and a decorator on retainer and Elin Hilderbrand has spent thirty summers watching it dock. In Swan Song, she lets the newest, richest arrivals throw the party everyone will remember. Then she sets the house on fire.

What it's about

The Richardsons are the wealthiest newcomers the island has ever seen and their arrival is the sort of thing that reorders a summer's whole social calendar. Their twenty-two million dollar oceanfront place becomes the setting for the party of the season, the kind with valet golf carts and a guest list that doubles as a status report. By midnight the house is burning into the sea, one guest has vanished and the tidy summer everyone was promised has come apart. Chief Ed Kapenash, a Hilderbrand regular, catches the case. What follows braids old island loyalties, new island envy and the small betrayals that money makes possible. It is also, pointedly, Hilderbrand's farewell to the setting she built her career on.

Why everyone's talking about it

The headline is the goodbye. After more than two dozen books set on the same sandy stretch, Hilderbrand announced Swan Song as her last Nantucket novel and readers treated it accordingly: a sendoff, a victory lap, a chance to say goodbye to a place they only ever visited between covers. It landed on the bestseller lists on arrival, which is roughly what happens every time she publishes.

This one hits hardest for the reader who has followed the whole run and wants the cameos, the callbacks, the sense of a world closing its shutters for the season. It also works fine as a first date: the mystery gives newcomers a spine to hold onto while the beach-house atmosphere does its usual seductive work. Skip it if you want a tightly wound procedural where every clue snaps into place. Hilderbrand cares more about the people at the party than the timeline of the fire and she always has.

The verdict, for now

If summer reading is a food group for you, this belongs in the tote. Come for the arson and the missing guest, stay for the slow, satisfying autopsy of a very expensive social order. Just accept going in that the island, not the crime, is the thing she most wants you to miss when it is gone.