Dark Nantucket Noon — Jane Langton

MURDER AND BETRAYAL ECLIPSE AN ISLAND PARADISE

It was a dark moment on Nantucket in more ways than one. A total eclipse of the sun has cast two and a half minutes of daytime into unnatural night, and when the sun reemerges, the poet Kitty Clark finds herself standing alone at Great Point with a dead body at her feet.

To Kitty's surprise, the man coming toward her now is her former lover, Joe Green, and the woman at her feet, his wife. She is even more surprised when she is arrested for the murder of Helen Green, when she had only come to Nantucket from Boston to see an eclipse. And, you see, she only carries the knife in her bag for protection.

Sleuthing Harvard professor Homer Kelly, on the island researching Herman Melville, is the only one who believes her. And when he sets out to prove the innocence of this sexually betrayed young, woman who had every reason to kill, he finds himself in hot water. Among the rich and righteous of the Nantucket upper crust, the true murderer is yet to be found--someone who has killed already and might be prepared to do it again.