The Washashore by Marshall Highet and Bird Jones, Köehlerbooks 2025, 274 pgs., $27.95 (hc) $19.95 (pb).
At the beginning of Bird Jones and Marshall Highet’s new novel The Washashore, 16-year-old Emily Cartwright is arriving on the shores of 1929 Martha’s Vineyard moving from one crisis to another. She’s just recently lost her mother and been assigned by the court to the custody of her Aunt Isabel Hewett. Making the long and rocky journey from Nebraska to New Bedford, her emotions are in turmoil and her future completely in question. But Aunt Isabel hardly represents any kind of safe haven. As Emily quickly learns, her aunt is an imperious, opinionated social matron who rules her part of the Island with an unblinking eye.
In their first conversation, for instance, Aunt Isabel not only objects to being referred to as anybody’s aunt (“You certainly are an aunt,” Emily rebelliously thinks, “as you are my mother’s sister”), but she also objects to Emily’s name. She decides to refer to her by her middle name, Frances, and when Emily tells her she’s not particularly fond of that name, her aunt immediately shoots back, “And I am not particularly invested in which name you are fond of.”
A very rocky start to be sure, and things only get worse.
Emily quickly learns the reason why Aunt Isabel insists on the name change: six years before, her daughter, also named Emily, had gone surf-casting at South Beach and had never been seen again. Likewise, here in the height of Prohibition, there are rumors of contraband ships off the coast, and the sea brings more tragic news: Aunt Isabel learns that her friend, Ann Simpson, has died at sea.
Emily had been impressed by her aunt’s forbidding presence. “She could easily see how her aunt would be a larger-than-life character, despite being so small-statured,” she thinks at one point. “She had, as Emily’s mother would say, bearing.” But this unexpected tragedy starts to break her aunt’s reserve, and this process continues as the two become an unlikely team in figuring out what really happened to Ann Simpson.
There are plenty of unanswered questions and a couple of likely suspects, including a Mob boss and a rum-runner, each one of whom has had to learn new skills thanks to Prohibition. And in a neatly-done bit of parallel storytelling, all the while Emily is learning more about these suspects and their associates, she is also learning more about life on the Vineyard, from experiencing her first frappé (and loving it, of course) to appreciating the natural glories of the Island in late April as the grip of winter vanishes: “Em could almost hear the scraggly rose stems growing in the warmth, winding around the pickets of the white fences, and the new leaves unfurling from the apple tree’s low-hanging branches as they passed.”
Ms. Highet and Ms. Jones shaped this simple story into an adventure story that’s one-half crime thriller and one-half coming-of-age, like a combination of Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables. Emily is an utterly winning main character, trusting in her own abilities but also vulnerable and yearning for stability to return to her life. As the book’s action escalates, readers will both worry for her safety and increasingly trust her resourcefulness. The many period details from the late twenties are worked in smoothly and unobtrusively throughout the narrative, completely avoiding that bane of most historical fiction, the dreaded info-dump.
A surprisingly sensitive portrait of a century-gone Vineyard emerges right alongside a gripping crime story that accelerates into chases and gunfire. The world dominated by Aunt Isabel is still the mostly rural small-town place that immortally forms the backdrop for Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s beloved Asey Mayo mysteries (which were written only a couple of years after the time when The Washashore is set). The natural beauty of the Island is wonderfully evoked throughout, but the stampeding crowds of seasonal tourists are still a few decades away. The historical tone is struck perfectly.
By the time the book’s main plot reaches its climax, readers will be thoroughly enamored of young Emily and fully invested in the handful of crucial mysteries about her own background. In the final pages, those readers are clearly meant to be cheering her on, and they certainly will be. But it’s a good bet that more than a few of them will also be rooting for Aunt Isabel (and her little dog).
This article appears in January 16, 2026.