After a long career in the theater, Hilary Cohen has broken new ground for herself with a series of mystery novels. Using as her setting the remote Grenadine Islands of the southern Caribbean where she has sailed herself for decades, she has drawn on her adventures on the open seas and her deep knowledge of island life to create the backdrop. The first in the series, A Turquoise Grave, was published in 2023. She has brought back popular sailing sleuth Maggie Mullaley in the current sequel, A Coffin Full of Pineapples. Hilary has worked in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright for more than 40 years. She has also published widely, writing about the arts and travel for numerous professional journals, magazines, and blogs. She feels that her years of work in the theater, developing characters, building plots, using improvisation with troupes of actors, has been great training for novel writing. She is a passionate sailor and combines her love of storytelling, travel, and sailing in this new novel. Hilary lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Although mystery writing is a recent addition to Hilary's range of artistic activity, the seeds for the series of sailboat mysteries were actually planted many years ago. For decades, Hilary and her husband, Michael, explored the remote waters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the southern Caribbean by sailboat, combing its bays, and coves, and villages, when it occurred to her what a perfect setting this tiny island chain would be for a mystery. An enthusiastic reader of mysteries, the destination of the far-flung islands offered much she admired in her favorites, exotic locations, adventures, an international gathering of interesting characters.
Speaking of which, not only has Hilary made numerous sailing trips in the Grenadines, 18 at last count, but she has also crisscrossed the Mediterranean back and forth between Turkey and Greece in an old, banged-up charter boat practically held together with duct tape, and sailed the Pacific from Tahiti to Hawaii in a 60-foot former round-the-world racer.
Though she knew she could make use of her sailing experiences for this project as well as the reservoir of personal knowledge she had gained from her years of onshore visits in the Caribbean, she also realized the important role research would play. With her network of contacts built over the decades of visits, she was able to interview dozens of people: shopkeepers, bar and restaurant proprietors, taxi drivers, faith and holistic healers, market vendors, police detectives, innkeepers, lawyers. She studied the legal and political systems, court documents, and the unfolding political environment for building the new airport as well as its international political ramifications. She received permission to visit and was guided through several of the capital of St. Vincent's key buildings: the Milton Cato Hospital, the High Court, the office of the Chief of Police, the city jail - the morgue.
