Em Ridge Mysteries

The Devil To Pay

Pink and white-sand beaches. Pristine waters. Tiki bars and Murder. Captain Em Ridge is back. Just a little jaunt to beautiful Eleuthera. Three couples had sailed to Eleuthera. Em just had to ferry the two yachts back to Florida. And Em has help. A newly minted Captain. But one of the six had died here. One remains on the island. Can Em make it to Florida before the hurricane hit? Can she keep herself and the newly minted captain alive? What will it take to survive? What will it take to make it safely home to her little spot in Maine? The Devil to Pay is the third book in the highly acclaimed Em Ridge Mystery Series which began with Night Watch, continued with The Bitter End. The adventure continues for widowed boat captain, Em Ridge. Like the titles of all of the Em Ridge sailing mysteries, ‘the devil to pay' is a nautical term. In the old days of boat building, the individual planks of the ship were sealed with a tar. This was called “paying” the seams. The ‘devil’ seam was the curved seam on the underside of the ship, named so, because according to Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book, paying or tarring this seam was “considered to be a most difficult and unpleasant task.” Paying the devil has come to mean anything unpleasant or difficult to do.

The Bitter End

What can possibly go wrong in the Bermuda Triangle? For the past two weeks, boat delivery Captain Em Ridge has been ferrying a well-known TV conspiracy-theorist around the waters of the Bermuda Triangle. She is tired of his tales of reptilian governments, middle-earth civilizations and of course, all his theories about the Bermuda Triangle. Em just wants to finish up this assignment, get paid, and head back to her home in Maine. But a chance sighting finds them aboard a "ghost sailboat". The salon is set neatly for supper, wine in the glasses, pots on the stove, bread on the table and not a soul aboard. Worse, she knows this boat. When a black cat slinks noiselessly around her feet, Em’s alarm hikes up to horror. Has someone purposely set this boat out here? Is it a warning? To her? Finding this boat plunges Em into a decades old mystery that threatens not only her, but her entire family.

Night Watch

Desolate Maine shores... Murder... And peace slipping away on the outgoing tide... 

For yacht delivery captain, Em Ridge, having a billionaire's daughter go overboard on her first captaining job is not a good beginning. The sailboat is new, state of the art, her crew on this trip include two close sailing friends. But an unknown fourth, who can't even tie a bowline, and the unruly owner's daughter turn the idyllic trip into an adventure not wanted. 

Two years ago Em buried her husband, her soulmate, her sailing buddy, and with him buried a secret. As hours on the open seas slide by, secrets are resurrected that tie Em's past to a present, awash with murder and deception. 

Will Em's career go overboard? Will the investigating detective help her or hurt her? Any why does the best boat delivery captain on the east coast pull at her heart strings? 

The oft foggy coast of Maine holds secrets it does not want to give up, and a lot of bodies can be hidden in The Pine Tree State's largest city. 

"Linda Hall is one of my favorite mystery-suspense writers. Night Watch is full of twists and turns. It grabbed my attention in the beginning and kept it all the way through the book. I especially loved her main character and can't wait to read the next book in her series." Patricia Rushford, author of Sins of the Mother