Now the characters were starting to come together in the haphazard, fits-and-starts way all my characters in all of my books come together. (In other words, not in the tidily outlined way of a mega-selling thriller writer.)

What, then, about setting? I had set all my books up to this point in places I’d lived: Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Maine. I knew I wanted this book to take place over the course of a summer, so I wanted a summery setting, again in New England, and I wanted it to be somewhere I had not set a book before. Even better, I wanted a place where the population grows exponentially during the months of June, July, and August, and a place perhaps not familiar to everyone the way a major tourist destination might be.

The same summer I was thinking about this, photos of Block Island, a small island off the coast of Rhode Island, kept popping up on my social media feeds. It seemed a lot of people were having a lot of fun on Block Island. I’ve been to Rhode Island plenty of times. I went to college there, as did both of my parents. I got married in Rhode Island! A Rhode Island native in an earlier novel of mine, The Admissions, calls it “the tiniest state in the Union, but the one with the biggest heart.” I love that little state. But here I was, a complete stranger to its offshore treasure.

Clearly, a day trip was in order. So one August day in the summer of 2016 my husband and I deposited our kids with my in-laws and made our way to Block Island via the ferry from Newport. It was a picture-perfect summer Saturday, and the ferry was crammed with all manner of day-trippers. I was still on the ferry, not yet having set foot on the island, when the setting of The Islanders started to come alive.

It’s not hard to fall in love with Block Island in August. The hustle and bustle at the ferry terminal! The beaches! The restaurants, the sunburns, the mudslides! Yes, I thought, many times throughout the day. Yes, yes, yes. We rented bikes and rode to the end of Corn Neck Road. We ate lunch looking out at Great Salt Pond. Yes! We dipped in the water at Scotch Beach. Yes. As soon as I got home, I started writing.

I went back to Block Island again the following March for four days of solitary writing, and I loved it just as much in its winter clothes, when the year-round population shrinks to approximately 1,000. I was entranced by the tiny school (160 students, K–12), the grocery store, the few eating establishments that remained open. The wild beauty of the place. The independent bookstore, which figures into the finished novel in a few important ways.

I kept writing. Those Pucketts, after all, weren’t going to tell their own story; I had to tell it for them. But even as I wrote, doubts nagged me. What business did I have setting a book in a place I was just getting to know? Seriously, who did I think I was? What if I misrepresented the island? Sometimes the task seemed audacious to the point of presumption. To quiet those nagging voices, I read many back issues of the Block Island Times. I took a tour of the island with the generous executive director of the Block Island Historical Society. Online I found a short documentary about the island’s single school, and I watched that. I asked questions of locals when I could. Summer rolled around again, and I went back, filling in details I’d missed the first few times around.