Best-selling English novelist Sarah Pearse's latest is "The Wilds." The "Sanatorium" writer's mystery begins when a vacationing detective learns of the disappearance of a young woman.

My husband and I were about to embark on a long drive from Washington to a cabin on the Maine coast, just across West Penobscot Bay from Islesboro, a skinny, sparsely populated 13-mile-long island.