In Come Shell or High Water, amateur sleuth Maureen Nash’s neighbor, Burt Weaver, took up daily muffin baking during the pandemic. He’s continued the practice, calling it his morning muffin meditation. “The Fig, Walnut & Spice Muffins recipe is the first recipe I’ve come up with on my own,” he says. “It makes 18 muffins—sometimes 17, if I’m heavy-handed in filling the muffin cups. When my sister Glady asked if I was ever going to fix the recipe so that it makes a standard dozen, I asked who she was kidding. Seventeen or 18 muffins is better than a dozen or a baker’s dozen any day. This recipe makes a Burt’s dozen.”
- 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
- ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
- 1 cup dried figs, stems removed, chopped into raisin-size pieces (or a little bigger)
- 1 cup walnuts, chopped
- 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
- 1¼ cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 1 cup plain Greek yogurt
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- Preheat oven to 400°. If you have 2 (12-well) muffin pans, butter 18 of the muffin cups or line them with muffin papers. Otherwise, bake 12 muffins and, after the pan cools, prepare 6 of the cups again to bake the final 6 muffins.
- In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, ginger, and cardamom. Stir in figs and walnuts.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together butter, brown sugar, yogurt, eggs, and vanilla extract. Add butter mixture to flour mixture, stirring until just combined. (Batter will be thick.) Fill prepared muffin cups approximately three-fourths full.
- Bake until a wooden pick inserted in centers comes out clean, 15 to 20 minutes. Turn muffins out onto a wire rack, and let cool.
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 among 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 18th-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.
Molly MacRae is the award-winning author of the Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries, the Highland Bookshop Mysteries, and the new Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries. Born and raised in Illinois, Molly spent 20 years in the foothills of Tennessee’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where she was the director of the history museum for Jonesborough, the state’s oldest town. During that time, Molly and her family started taking vacations to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where she fell in love with Ocracoke Island, the setting for her Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries. Molly, who is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, has won the Sherwood Anderson Award for short fiction, and several of her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She currently lives in Champaign, Illinois, with her family. For more information on Molly and her books, please visit MollyMacRae.com or follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
