The Midcoast

DEBUT In this sometimes-noir tale of small-town social climbing, Andy moves back to his hometown with his family after years away and finds Damariscotta, ME, both unchanged and much changed. Lobsterman Ed Thatch, son of the owner of the town’s lobster pound and whom Andy worked with one summer, is now the town’s richest man and married to Steph, a non-Mainer, who is now the town manager bent on “improving” the working-class community. Ed has his own civic projects, such as donating the funding for a town athletic field. Though the Thatches sell themselves as an American success story, Ed seems to have resources well beyond those of a lobsterman, and some locals have suspicions. Andy, an English teacher, does his own investigation through writing a book on the Thatches. The suspicions come to a head when two men associated with the drug trade are found dead, and EJ (the Thatches’ son, a Damariscotta police officer) vanishes, only to turn up dead in Ohio.