Note to readers:

Little North Island is not a real place; it does not exist on any map. Rather, it is an amalgamation of so many of the things I find beautiful about Downeast Maine and particularly Mount Desert Island and its many neighboring smaller islands. My family has spent summers there for a long as I can remember. When I was very small we visited my grandparents at their house in Otter Creek, and in later years our family camped each summer for a couple of weeks in one of the many campgrounds on Mt. Desert—eventually, once my brothers and I were grown, my parents bought property and had a log home built on it, and it is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Most of the settings found in Murder Will Out (and the books I hope will follow) are inspired at least in part by an actual place in that part of Maine. The North Island Village green is a lower-key version of the one in Bar Harbor with about one tenth the tourist-vibe. The Little North dock is straight out of Islesford on Little Cranberry, with its dock restaurant and little row of shops. Rina’s pottery shop is inspired by Marian Baker’s Islesford Pottery (Check it out here!) there on the dock, where a number of fantastic ceramic artists (including my mom) have their work sold. Joe and Frank’s bakery, though it doesn’t show up in the final edit of this book, looks in my mind’s eye a lot like the Little Notch Bakery in Southwest Harbor.  And Aunt Sue’s cabin is my parents’ house, where I still love to visit and curl up in the loft under the skylights.

What does not exist anywhere but in my imagination and dreams is Cameron House itself, though my family is growing weary of me dragging them from one place to the other looking for the perfect combination of turrets, chimneys, and of course a widow’s walk, to be a stand-in for the house in the novel. In the early twentieth century, more than 200 wealthy families had summer “cottages” in Bar Harbor, Maine, but the Great Depression took its toll, and the tragic fire of 1947 destroyed most of what was left; very few of those opulent homes remain. In my own imagination, old Andrew Cameron wanted to build something on his island that Rockefeller and Carnegie would be forced to look at when they gazed out over the unspoiled landscape. (I’m sure we’ll meet Andrew Cameron in some future book, but be assured he was not a very nice man.)

So—the house we will just all discover together as we go. The house, and its ghosts.