The hall is blanketed with night. I should go back upstairs and go to bed, properly this time, but I’m parched. Careful as can be, I pad down the stairs on my way to the kitchen as moonlight streams through the warped windows. I find the glasses easily, fill one with water from a special tap attached to the farmhouse sink, and take a long draw.

The only sounds are the rhythmic croaking of crickets outside and the occasional snort from upstairs. There’s something magnetic about the house. I can’t resist the chance to explore unchaperoned. I take my water with me. The furniture is reduced to shades of gray in the night, but I pad around the first floor. I can make out a formal dining room, with an obscenely long table; a fussy sitting room, filled with knickknacks and china poised precariously in glassed-in cabinets. There’s a proper living room, with a giant TV and a comfy-looking couch—I’m relieved to learn that my grandmother isn’t the type of old person who refuses to own a television—and, tucked next to the stairs, a closed door. Quietly as I can, I slide the hulking wooden frame to the left and step into the most glorious space. I can make out wall-to-wall shelves of books. A desk in the center. A library? I should have brought my phone for light. Then I remember there are…you know, actual lights. I switch on a desk lamp.

Not a library. It’s Maura’s office. Every book on the wall bears her name. Hundreds of them—each title has at least a dozen copies, some in different languages, and they’re arranged in chronological order. I know because Killer Queen is first on the left—Maura’s bestselling debut—and A Deadly Glen, her latest, about a group stranded in the woods with a murderer, is to the far right. I search for the boat one, to jog my memory. I find it in the middle shelf behind her desk. Out to Sea is the title. The captain did it. I thought it was okay. A little soapy for my taste, with an annoyingly smug heroine.