Margel's Madness

Award-winning nautical mystery writer Darcy Scott sails her authorial craft into deeper waters with Margel’s Madness, an unflinching, semi-autobiographical take on a young woman’s determination to make a fresh start—an extraordinarily powerful tale of family secrets, emotional betrayal and hidden death.

Tension is high in Mosquito Harbor, Maine, where the eccentric Cousins family is facing off against wealthy escapees from urban sprawl determined on carving out their own piece of the coast. Edgy, intense Margel Matthews, a 30-year-old single mother also “from away,” is an escapee of a different sort. Having broken with her toxic family, she lands in town desperate for a quiet life with her free-spirited, four-year-old daughter, only to find herself befriended against all local tradition by the Cousins’ crusty, seventy-year-old patriarch.

When her mother’s death draws near, Margel is forced into a guilt-ridden re-involvement with all she left behind, only to be rocked by explosive revelations about the part she unknowingly played in the unspeakable betrayals of her childhood. As she fights to protect her daughter from the horrors of her past and a darkness she, herself, carries, a shocking discovery shakes the town to its core and she’s forced to choose between a fleeting chance at happiness and her responsibilities to those she loves.