With A Turquoise Grave, Hilary Cohen embarks on mystery writing for the first time in a long career in the arts. She has worked in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright for more than 40 years. She has also published widely, writing about the arts and travel for numerous professional journals, magazines, and blogs. She is a passionate sailor and combined her love of storytelling, travel, and sailing in a piece she wrote for the New York Times Travel Section in 2017, the combination a hint of the mystery novel to come.

The seeds for A Turquoise Grave were actually planted many years ago. For decades, Hilary and her husband, Michael, explored the remote waters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the southern Caribbean by sailboat, combing its bays, and coves, and villages, when it occurred to her what a perfect setting this tiny island chain would be for a mystery. An enthusiastic reader of mysteries, the destination of the far-flung islands offered much she admired in her favorites.

The exotic location put her in mind of the secluded Three Pines village of Louise Penny, as well as Jason Goodwin’s far-off 18th century Istanbul, and Donna Leon’s contemporary Venice. The sweet Grenadine villages had the potential for the cozy mysteries filled with charming but particular characters that she was also drawn to. But Hilary has an adventurous spirit as well and she thought of the horse racing thrills of the Dick Francis series as she contemplated drawing on some of her own heart stopping sailing escapades.

Speaking of which, not only has Hilary made numerous sailing trips in the Grenadines, 18 at last count, but she has also crisscrossed the Mediterranean back and forth between Turkey and Greece in an old, banged-up charter boat practically held together with duct tape, and sailed the Pacific from Tahiti to Hawaii in a 60-foot former round-the-world racer. Though she knew she could make use of her sailing experiences for this project as well as the reservoir of personal knowledge she had gained from her years of onshore visits in the Caribbean, she also realized the important role research would play.

With her network of contacts built over the decades of visits, she was able to interview dozens of people: shopkeepers, bar and restaurant proprietors, taxi drivers, faith and holistic healers, market vendors, police detectives, innkeepers, lawyers. She studied the legal and political systems, court documents, and the unfolding political environment for building the new airport as well as its international political ramifications. She received permission to visit and was guided through several of the capital of St. Vincent’s key buildings: the Milton Cato Hospital, the High Court, the office of the Chief of Police, the city jail -- the morgue.

With A Turquoise Grave, Hilary is excited to start this new chapter in her story making career.