Muddy the Water
When a popular fishing captain is murdered on his own trawler, everyone in Haversport, Massachusetts, knows the culprit is a young deckhand named Ben Broome, including Detective Lillian Grimes. But Ben has discovered the perfect hiding place: as a reporter writing for the tiny Coastal Packet, a newspaper down in South Carolina.
When a half-eaten body washes in, it becomes the biggest story in the paper’s history and brings cunning, charismatic Ben immediate success. But it also leads Grimes closer to the truth. She soon teams up with hungry rival reporter Florence Park to hunt Ben down before he can charm—or kill—his way to freedom.
Shown from three perspectives, killer, detective, and reporter, Muddy the Water brings readers inside the newsroom of a struggling small newspaper on the bucolic South Carolina coast and speaks to the concept of identity—and whether anyone ever shows their true self.
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Matt Barrows is a reporter who has covered the San Francisco 49ers for more than two decades for The Athletic and the Sacramento Bee. He spent two years in South Carolina with the Hilton Head Island Packet, where he won an award for environmental reporting. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Virginia and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. An avid birder and amazing uncle, Matt thinks his older sister is bossy and sends too many early-morning texts.
