Three obituaries reached Nell Carver's desk that October. The first was for her best friend, dead thirteen years. The second was for a man who was still breathing. The third was her own.
Nell runs the weekly newspaper on Cutter Island, North Carolina: nine hundred people and one ferry. Mostly she writes up the island's dead. So she knows what she is holding when an unsigned obituary comes through her mail slot. It says Abby Quinn did not drown on the night of their high school graduation. She was put in the water. Ask the man who pulled her out.
That man is Dale Hadley, police chief for thirty-two years, now dying six blocks from Nell's desk. Nell is about to marry his son.
The same morning, Cole Mercer steps off the ferry. He was the boy Nell loved, the last one seen with Abby, and he left the island before the tide turned. He says he wrote Nell forty letters. She never got one.
Now a second obituary has arrived for a man who is not dead yet. Someone is searching her father's office in the dark. A storm is about to shut down the ferry. And Nell's father, silenced by a stroke, has only one word left to warn her.
The Light at Cutter Point is a love story and a small-town mystery about what an island agrees to believe, and what it costs one woman to print the truth.