Come Shell or High Water (Haunted Shell Shop Mystery Book #1) by Molly MacRae

When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .

As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger—the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .
 
In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.  (Summary via Goodreads)

Come Shell or High Water by Molly MacRae is the first book in her new Haunted Shell Shop Mystery series and it sets the series beautifully.

In Come Shell or High Water Maureen Nash returns to a place of happier times, the Ocracoke Island.  This was the place she and her deceased husband use to visit with their sons when they were all younger.  She has a number of reasons for returning and one is because her husband had received letters from the owner of the famous shell shop there and she was hoping to find answers.  Unfortunately she gets there at the tale end of a hurricane and instead of answers she ends up with a lot of questions.  

Sadly she wakes up in the shell shop with two people standing over her thinking she is dead but she is very much alive but finds out she was electrocuted.  Glady and Burt are neighbors to the shell shop and are there to help her.  But it becomes too much for all of them when Maureen remembers stumbling across a dead body in the wooded area near the beach.  Sadly when it is investigated they find out it is Allen, the owner of the shell shop. 

While Maureen and her new friends, Glady and Burt, try to find out who killed Allen, Maureen also meets the resident ghost and has to get use to being around him ..... and there is a lot more that happens but you have to read it to find out.

Come Shell or High Water is a story readers will fall in love with !!  There is so much to love ... the setting, the characters, the shop, the storyline, the ghost .... and the way that MacRae ends the story, this is guarenteed to have readers checking for the next book so they can read it as soon as it is released !!!