Thriller, Coming Of Age Authors To Sign Books In Chatham

If you enjoy a twisty psychological thriller, the kind of novel you stay up all night reading because you just can’t put it down, Carol Snow’s “The Girl on the Beach” (Crooked Lane Books, 2026) is for you.

 Imagine a glamorous couple, Graham and Sonia, who seem to have it all, including a waterfront second home on a beach in Santa Barbara. During this particular summer they have a live-in nanny, Colleen, tending their daughter, 4-year-old Roxie.

 Then, in August, the unthinkable happens. Unobserved, Roxie disappears into the Pacific surf. Her inflatable is later found down the beach.

 When the novel begins, Colleen, now 21 and suffering from the psychological after-effects of the terrible event, returns to the beach house for a few days, hoping to find some kind of closure. Graham and Sonia are divorcing, and the house is going on the market. But instead of peace, Colleen thinks she sees Roxie on the beach. Is it possible that Roxie is alive? Colleen turns detective to find the truth. The chapters set in the present are interspersed with chapters set in the past, describing the family’s life with the nanny and child. Just as the suspense has reached an unbearable pitch, a plot twist comes that it’s guaranteed you did not see coming.

 These days Snow splits her time between Southern California and Orleans. Growing up, she spent every summer in North Chatham, where her parents owned a house.

 “My roots on the Cape are deep,” she said in an email interview last week. “I’m descended (a few too many times, yikes) from Constance and Nicholas Snow, who settled Eastham, which then included Orleans, in the mid-1600s. There are also assorted Eldredges, Nickersons and Cookes in my family tree.”

 She remembers her early summers in Chatham fondly.

 “There was no television reception in those days, so after dinner we would stroll down Chatham’s then-sleepy Main Street and borrow stacks of books from the Eldredge Public Library,” she says. As a teen, she worked summer jobs in local hotels and restaurants and even as a tour guide in a museum in Brewster.

 After she graduated from Brown University and later married at Ocean Edge, she worked as a freelance writer and editor. Her debut novel “Been There, Done That,” was published in 2006. “The Girl on the Beach” is her 10th novel.

 While Snow started her career writing romantic comedies, sometimes “with a touch of mystery,” she moved on to young adult fiction. Today she finds psychological thrillers “a fun challenge — far more plot-based than my previous work.”

 At any given time, she might have several novel ideas “banging around” in her head. “Before I commit to a book, I typically sketch out some plot arcs to see if there’s enough substance to work with and whether I have a clear sense of narrative directions,” she says. “Next, I’ll show the synopsis to my agent to get her take on whether she thinks the idea works and whether she anticipates sufficient demand in the marketplace.”

 If that all checks out, she writes the book. “I always know how my books are going to end (at least I think I do), but characters tend to surprise me,” she says. “The act of writing sparks ideas and connections.”

 Does her degree in psychology help with her characters?

 Yes. It helps with character development, which drives the plot. “You can’t (or shouldn’t) make a character behave in a way that feels inconsistent with everything else that has been presented,” she says. “To do so risks straining readers’ credulity.”

 Snow is now plotting out her next novel. She hasn’t yet committed, but she’d like to set it on Cape Cod.

Snow will sign “The Girl on the Beach” at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham on Saturday, Aug. 15, from 1 to 3 p.m.

Author Joseph Gibbs will again sign his debut novel “Frank” (Brogan Camden, 2022). No less a literary eminence than Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called the book “a magnificent novel” and “wonderfully comic, funny.”

Above the title “Frank” on the book’s cover is the sentence, “Every family has their hidden crackpot.” This gives you a little taste of what is to come in this idiosyncratic and funny coming-of-age story about Brogan, a senior at a New Jersey prep school, heading to MIT on a full scholarship.

 When Uncle Frank (a “philanderer, con artist, gambler” whose birthday checks always reek of gasoline), shows up uninvited on Thanksgiving, things pop when the uncle and nephew embark on a road trip.

Gibbs, a native of New Jersey, graduated from Fordham University with a B.A. in English literature in 1996. He is currently working on his next novel. Gibbs has participated in the Bigger Boat Visiting Writers’ Series at Cape Cod Community College and this summer led an eight-week novel writing seminar at the Hyannis Library.

 Gibbs will sign copies of “Frank” at Yellow Umbrella Books on Saturday, Aug. 22 from noon to 3 p.m.