Maple Bay, Nova Scotia, is famous for it’s stories of buried pirate treasure which has fascinated locals and tourists for generations. It’s also a town full of secrets. When three strangers converge on the small town, they set off a chain of events that brings long held secrets to light, and leads to murder.

Tom Ryan is a Canadian author, screen writer and producer. He also wrote the YA mystery Keep This To Yourself, which is currently optioned to be adapted into a TV series, and the Lamda award winning I Hope You’re Listening.

The book has such lovely cover art in this edition, which is very pirate-esque and a bit Boys Own. The story itself has three threads, following our three leads, in alternating chapters, and it’s a fairly quick, light read overall. One characters chapters are in first person: Peter, who gets an invitation to come to the historic mansion in Maple Bay to meet with long estranged family. Having been orphaned and raised by unkind relatives, he’s very curious to reconnect. The other two are Cass, who wrote a book, moved to NYC and then failed to thrive, and is invited to house sit in the small town for a year, and soon finds herself inspired to write about the missing treasure. And finally, teenager Dandy, reeling from the recent loss of her beloved Grandfather, who gets drawn into the mystery of the treasure by clues he left behind. There are also some diary entries in the book, scattered throughout.

Initially, as I started reading, I really enjoyed this book. I loved the historical, pirate theme and imagery, and the whole thing reads like a cozy mystery, though maybe some of the writing is a lot like YA in style. I was ready to enjoy smugglers in the cove and mysterious clues, family secrets… It’s a great premise. And I loved the Maritimes, Nova Scotia location. It’s very chucky knot fishermen sweaters and salty cold winds. The house of Bellwoods that stands at the heart of the town and the story is also great. I love an old home in a story.

However, after getting about a third of the way in, I found myself not enjoying it very much. Peter’s plotline being in first person is unnecessary, adds nothing to the story, and really draws your attention to this character, which overly foreshadow’s the big twist ending, and may even mean you see it coming. The middle feels slow, with the diary entries slowing down the overall plot. They also reveal that rather than an adventure to find the treasure, we already know that the treasure has been found and some of the characters know were it is. Not a great thing in a thriller or a mystery.

Cass’s story especially was a bit vacuous and dull. She’s very shallow and silly, poorly written in my opinion, and has a romance shoe-horned in that feels very flat. I did wonder why this book needed a romance at all. It’s ridiculous that she wrote one book that sold well and moved to one of the most expensive cities in the world. Knowing a tiny bit about how publishing pays advances and royalties, and how no one can live off the small amount that writing books makes alone, it seemed so strange to me. When her next effort is not a success, she seems to think she’s a failure, which felt a bit melodramatic. But not to worry, she’s immediately and fortuitously given a free, luxury home to live in for a year. I think I could have accepted this a bit more if she was a nicer, more realistically written person, and if this was a romance or drama, but in an adventure or mystery, well, I think you could have cut her while plot and lost nothing. She didn’t quite match the overall tone for me, and didn’t add anything.

Finally, I really didn’t like the ending. The twist is not that great, and I think a better mystery as a whole, with suspects and clues and one main character, would have worked better. The diary means that we know that the treasure was already found, so there’s no sense of urgency or tension, and a lot is happening in the past. I also felt like everyone, in the end, was very chill about money in a way that felt so privileged to me in a book about how money is bad and makes people do bad things. The way Cass has all her money problems solved by just being given a rent free luxury home to live in, at the start of the book, is telling, but in the end, people donate entire inheritances casually and the treasure is cavalierly disposed of. I won’t say where it is and why, but I did think, this treasure is a thing of historical significance, it probably had valuable things to teach about history, it’s discovery could have lead to a local museum and the whole town benefitting from becoming a destination for tourists. It could have benefited the whole area! It sounded to me like this book was written by someone who wanted to be on the bandwagon of “wealthy people are bad, money is bad”, but that has probably never had to really worry about money before. I mean, not really worry. Grocery prices are steadily rising, jobs are hard to come by and homelessness in on the rise, while these characters are casually being given houses in Nova Scotia and throwing away cash. (But then, I’ve been reading Sarah Smarsh’s latest Bone Of The Bone, which I highly recommend, and it does give you a different perspective. I’m sure Tom Ryan was just writing some entertaining fiction and not trying to spark a debate on financial planning and the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy in modern society.) But I digress.

Essentially, it’s a light, entertaining enough read and I liked the flowing, easy to read style. I think in tone it’s a bit like YA, in a good way. I think a little more mystery or a little more adventure could have improved this book, but it works fine as a cozy mystery. I think that ending that bothered me may not bother other readers, so I feel like this one falls around the middle range, in my estimation. It has it’s problems, but it’s not bad. If you’re looking for something cozy to read, you could do a lot worse, and I do think it won’t stop me from reading more from this author in the future.

Read It If: easy to get into, and with it’s nice small town atmosphere and fun premise, this is a quick cozy mystery read that could be quite popular, but may not be well realized enough to satisfy some readers.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for the ARC of this book for review.