Thickafog by Caleb Mason
An Evocative and Literate Island Murder Mystery
A review by Geoffrey Dutton
Publisher: Bookbaby, imprint Publerati
Publish Date: March 04, 2025
Pages: 356
Type: Paperback
EAN/UPC: 9798986617848
Dimensions: 8.9 X 5.9 X 0.9 inches | 1.2 pounds
List price: $18.95
Thickafog is what residents of Archer Island call the type of fog that unrolls over them from the Gulf of Maine, like a red carpet except it’s grey and hard to see through. Archer Island is two islands, one in warm months when it collects visitors, the other in the cold ones when they dissipate. It’s got a ferry terminal, a school system, a part-time policeman, a pretty good grocery store, a tavern for its sole restaurant, and even the Internet. We know nothing about its governance or political climate beyond that MAGA and Liberal types manage to coexist. The island used to supply granite blocks up and down the coast until the company ran out of it, but fortunes were made and handed down. Now the only industry is lobstering, and no one seems to be getting rich from working in it. But they catch a lot more than islanders can eat, so someone must be making money even if the lobstermen aren’t.
We know most of that courtesy of the main narrator, Jon Davis, a single finish carpenter in his thirties, I would say, with irregular gigs and a drinking problem. John lives alone in a large house bequeathed from his mother, but not recently. His estranged father, who got kicked out of a senior community in Florida for allegedly defrauding a female resident, has moved in with Jon. He’d never been to the island before and it takes some adjusting. But even at 83, Jon’s dad is a pretty sharp cookie and not past womanizing, which he proceeds to do to 80-something Ingrid Backlund, heiress of the quarry fortune and known as the Island Queen. Though somewhat regal, she’s articulate, sometimes peppery, and well-read, and Bobby finds her very attractive. Jon isn’t so sure about their budding love affair, nor are Ingrid’s kids, particularly her townie son Kevin, a bad seed if there ever was one and a druggie to boot.
Jon gets a job building a mansion for a West Coast billionaire overseen by a shady contractor from the mainland named Shane, who has annoyed everyone by taking up three spaces in the town lot with his beat-up RV. Kevin joins the crew, and then things start to go missing from the job site. Keven quickly comes to hate Bobby, whom he believes is a gold-digger bent on appropriating his mother’s big house when she dies. Ingrid suffers from dementia that worsens as time goes by. Everyone, including Kevin, wonders if Bobby is exploiting her forgetfulness for personal gain. And while personal gain is important to hopped-up Kevin, it’s not clear if it is for chivalrous Bobby. And then Bobby is murdered.
Sometimes working on the job site with Jon is Charlie, a motherless sixteen-year-old off-islander who is being sheltered by Jon’s good friend friend Dale. Charlie’s a good kid whose mother is up on drug charges and Dale is trying to keep him out of foster care, but Charlie, despite being bright and athletic, has trouble fitting in with his new peers. So Jon mentors him in carpentry and urges him to study computer programming because Charlie says he wants to design video games. But when Dale decides to move to New Jersey, Charlie neither wants to come nor wishes to stay. The obvious thing for Jon to do is to take Charlie in, but he feels he would fail due to the grip booze has on him, despite his friends urging him to sober up and shelter Charlie. Jon knows he should sober up and man up, but can’t bring himself to do that.
Bobby met his untimely end one thickafog night standing by the quarry, when someone beaned him with a rock and Bobby fell to his death. We learn this early on. The principle suspect is Jon, who was known to feud with his father. Somehow the rock that bashed Bobby’s skull was identified the next day and upon inspection features both John and Kevin’s fingerprints. So now what?
When questioned by police, Kevin said he was with his mother. John, who was at home, crashed in a drunken stupor, couldn’t recall if he’d been with his father or not. Naturally, he becomes the prime suspect in the absence of corroborating evidence. Even though townspeople rally to his support, Jon still feels bummed.
Though actively alcoholic, Jon has great diction as a narrator, thankfully without a Downeast accent, though there are plenty of those sprinkled into dialog. Sometimes a more distant narrator takes over, mostly recounting off-island events. It sometimes is hard to make the switch, as it is for Mason’s switches in time; chapters oscillate between November 2022 and December 2023. Each time it happened, to root my understanding I had to ask myself, “Is Bobby dead yet?” But after a dozen or so chapters of this murky timeline, I tired of keeping track.
There are many conversations between John and others and others and others, mostly well-handled. But some go on for quite a few pages, especially ones between Bobby and Ingrid, who both seem to have wide-ranging interests and sources of information, Ingrid in particular due to knowing everyone in town. I wish the editor had red-penciled some of them because they slow the pace down, not that it’s fast to begin with.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that all but four characters get out alive. When, at the end, Bobby’s assailant is revealed, it’s a bit of a surprise. The culprit might have been easier to guess had the author not sliced and diced the plotline as he did.
Thickafog vividly portrays an insular sort of place that boatloads of people visit but don’t get to know very well. Mason, who lives on Vinalhaven Island, knows the territory well. Thickafog is the first in a series called The Archer Island Mysteries, but it’s not Mason’s debut. He’s written a nonfiction book about Island of Shoals, three works of fiction under the name Don Trowden, and another co-authored with Valerie McKee. It moves slowly sometimes, but you won’t often notice thanks to its well-wrought characters, believable dialog, grounded sense of place, and local color. Despite some plot points that stretch credulity, it’s a successful telling that anyone who’s a fan of Murder, She Wrote can enjoy.
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