Saving Tuna Street, Paperback

Blanche "Bang" Murninghan is a part-time journalist with writer's block and a penchant for walking the beach on her beloved Santa Maria Island. Gran left her a cabin on Tuna Street, and she's got her friends and family--her itinerant cousin, Jack, and Cap, a lovable old fisherman who coddles her like a grandfather, and her friend, Liza, a realtor who looks like she emerged from central casting. All is well. Until the land-grabbing goons arrive from Chicago. Blanche finds herself in a tailspin, flabbergasted that so many things can go so wrong, so fast. Her friend, Bob Blankenship, Liza's partner, is found murdered in the parking lot of the marina, and she suspects the slick, handsome land developer Sergi Langstrom and his company of chaos are behind it all. Blanche keeps digging. All the way to hell. The goons, it seems, are a front for a drug cartel.The harder Blanche pushes against the source of trouble, the more she is sucked into the vortex of greed, murder, drug runners, and kidnapping (hers). The appearance of the mysterious Haasi, a tiny Native American with glossy braids and dark eyes, complicates things, and it's a good thing. She appears and disappears but always ends up at Blanche's side. They all keep getting closer to the sources of the spurious land development and the murder and the drug running. Who can look away? It's like watching a hurricane, which, literally, comes straight for Tuna Street.

Nancy Nau Sullivan began writing wavy lines at age six, thinking it was the beginning of her first novel. It wasn't. But she didn't stop writing, letters at first, then eight years of newspaper work in high school and college, in editorial posts at New York magazines, and for newspapers throughout the Midwest. She has a master's in journalism from Marquette University. Nancy grew up outside Chicago but often visited Anna Maria Island, Florida. She returned there with her family and wrote an award-winning memoir THE LAST CADILLAC (Walrus 2016) about the years she cared for her father while the kids were still at home--a harrowing adventure of travel, health issues, adolescent angst, with a hurricane thrown in for good measure. She went back to the setting for the first in her mystery series, SAVING TUNA STREET, creating the fictional Santa Maria Island where Blanche "Bang" Murninghan fends off drug-running land grabbers and solves the murder of her friend with the help of her Native American accomplice, Haasi. Blanche has feet of sand and will be off to Mexico, Argentina, and Spain for further mayhem in the series. But she always returns to Santa Maria Island. Nancy, for the most part, lives in Northwest Indiana. Find her at www.nancynausullivan.com, on Facebook, and Twitter @NauSullivan.