Everyone Knows but You

Pulitzer-winning reporter Ricks (Waging a Good War) delivers a crackling procedural about a grieving FBI agent who sets out to solve a murder in Maine. Though Ryan Tapia is still recovering from his wife’s and children’s deaths in an auto accident, he’s assigned to investigate the killing of Ricky Cutts, a lobsterman whose body has washed up on the shores of Liberty Island near Acadia National Park. Renting a cottage on the outskirts of Bangor, Tapia attempts to piece together Ricky’s fate. Over breakfast at a diner, a group of locals explain that Ricky was widely disliked—even by his own teenage daughters—and school Tapia on the ins and outs of the fisherman’s code. Then Tapia learns that Ricky’s boat was found in waters controlled by a Native American tribe, and realizes that he’ll have to dig into the fraught relations between white Mainers and their Indigenous neighbors to get the answers he seeks. The sturdy whodunit plot is enriched by the author’s firm grasp of his setting and a colorful cast of New Englanders who never veer into caricature. A sequel would be welcome. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (June)