The Island

The Island is a novel by Heather Graham, published in 2006 and set on an island where a holiday becomes an investigation.

Beth Anderson is on a weekend trip with her brother and her niece when a walk along the beach turns up what appears to be a human skull. The discovery brings back the case of the retired couple who disappeared from the island's coast a few months before, and when a stranger approaches her, Beth panics and hides the evidence. By the time she goes back to the beach the skull is gone, and the only witness to its existence is her niece. Her brother treats the whole business as a story worth telling around a campfire, and the other holidaymakers, including the stranger from the beach, are happy to dismiss it as an overactive imagination. Beth is left with no proof of anything and the growing suspicion that somebody on the island would prefer the matter to stay unexplained.

Graham writes romantic suspense in which the threat is domestic and the setting is closed, so the people who might help are also the people who cannot be ruled out.