Exploring the Secrets of the Savannah Mystery Series: The Yamacraw Moon, The Wormsloe Marsh and The Daufsukie Tide

The haunting beauty of Savannah’s marshlands inspires the setting of the Savannah Mystery Series

I’ve been thinking lately about what makes the Savannah Mystery Series different from my St. Augustine books.

The obvious answer is that there are no ghosts. Well, not literal ones, anyway.

Savannah has plenty of ghosts of its own—the kind that come from history, memory, family, grief, and all the things people carry with them long after they think they’ve put them away. That was something I wanted to explore when I began writing The Yamacraw Moon.

A Different Kind of Mystery

When I created Kate Gallagher, I didn’t want to write another detective.

Kate is an ordinary woman who finds herself in extraordinary circumstances. At the beginning of The Yamacraw Moon, she is grieving and much more fragile than she would ever let most people see.

That matters to me.

I grew up in the South, where there is a particular talent for looking perfectly fine when you are anything but. You fix your hair. You put on your lipstick. You smile when someone asks how you’re doing.

And sometimes you go home and fall apart.

Kate understands that world. She also discovers that grief can change a person in unexpected ways. The woman we meet at the beginning of The Yamacraw Moon is not quite the same woman we see in The Wormsloe Marsh, and she will continue to change in The Daufuskie Tide.

I think that growth has become one of my favorite parts of writing the series.

Savannah Is More Than a Setting

I could have placed these mysteries almost anywhere, but they wouldn’t have been the same stories.

Savannah is beautiful, but it is not uncomplicated.

There are the squares and old houses, the live oaks and Spanish moss, the river and marshes. There is also layer upon layer of history beneath all of it. That history matters in these books.

In The Yamacraw Moon, the past reaches directly into the present. In The Wormsloe Marsh, history, family, and place become tangled together in ways Kate does not initially understand. And in The Daufuskie Tide, the world expands again as the story moves toward Daufuskie Island and the waterways that connect the Lowcountry.

I love writing about those places because I know them.

I know what marsh grass smells like in the heat. I know what the air feels like before an afternoon thunderstorm. I know how beautiful a live oak can be—and how completely different that same tree looks after dark.

Those details aren’t scenery to me. They’re home.

The People Matter More Than the Murder

This may be a strange confession from a mystery writer, but the murder is rarely the part that interests me most.

I love constructing the mystery. I love planting clues and hiding things in plain sight. And I certainly enjoy leading readers confidently in the wrong direction.

But what keeps me interested is what happens to the people. What does grief do to someone?

What happens when loyalty conflicts with truth? How well do we really know the people we love?

What do families keep hidden, and why? And what happens when an ordinary person is forced to decide whether she is brave enough to do something she never imagined herself doing?

Those are the questions underneath the Savannah books.

The mystery gives me a way to ask them.

Kate’s World Is Still Growing

The Yamacraw Moon began Kate’s story. The Wormsloe Marsh carried her farther into a world she never expected to inhabit, while also deepening the relationships around her.

Next comes The Daufuskie Tide.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Kate’s world continues to get larger—and so does the emotional story running underneath the mysteries.

That is something I hope readers will enjoy about this series. Each book has its own mystery, but Kate’s life doesn’t reset when the mystery ends. Relationships change. Experiences leave marks. People grow closer. Some things heal, while other things become more complicated.

In other words, life keeps happening.

Come to Savannah With Me

If you haven’t started the Savannah Mystery Series yet, begin with The Yamacraw Moon.

Come meet Kate when she is still trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other. Walk through Savannah with her. Follow her into places she has absolutely no business going. Meet the people who will become important to her.

And pay attention.

I am a mystery writer, after all.

I don’t put everything on the page by accident.

— RL Imre