The first four books in my Edgar Award-winning series of crime novels had Liam Mulligan working as an investigative reporter for a dying Providence, R.I. newspaper. The job didn’t pay much, so he lived in a rundown tenement house in the city’s Federal Hill neighborhood. But in A Scourge of Vipers, the failing newspaper finally let Mulligan go.
The latest novel, The Dread Line, finds Mulligan living in a five room cottage in Jamestown, the lone municipality on the island of Conanicut, which basks like a harbor seal at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. There, he is piecing together a new life for himself — and of course, he still manages to find trouble, when it isn’t finding him.
The change of scenery is has definitely been good for Mulligan. Providence, and the street he lived on there, looked like this:
But now he lives on the island, just a 45-minute drive from downtown Providence.