With A Coffin Full of Pineapples, Hilary Cohen expands her growing series of Caribbean Island mystery novels, first begun in 2023 with A Turquoise Grave.  The mysteries are a recent addition to Hilary’s long career in the arts.  She has worked in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright for more than 40 years. She has also published widely, writing about the arts and travel for numerous professional journals, magazines, and blogs. She is a passionate sailor and combined her love of storytelling, travel, and sailing in a piece she wrote for the New York Times Travel Section in 2017, the combination a hint of the mystery novels to come.

Although mystery writing is a recent addition to Hilary's range of artistic activity, the seeds for the series were actually planted many years ago. For decades, Hilary and her late husband Michael explored the remote waters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the southern Caribbean by sailboat, combing its bays and coves, its anchorages and villages, sailing every conceivable route from one island to another. Eventually, it occurred to her what an intriguing setting this tiny island chain could be for a mystery novel. An enthusiastic reader of the form herself, Hilary found that the destination offered much that drew her to her favorites: an exotic location; an interesting mix of local and international characters; a complex, multi-layered political history; a tradition of homegrown resilience; and seriously hold-your-breath adventures on the high seas.

Speaking of which, Hilary has some personal experience of heart-in-your mouth sailing of her own. Not only has she made numerous sailing trips in the Grenadines, 18 at last count, but she has also crisscrossed the Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece in an old, banged-up charter boat practically held together with duct tape, and sailed the Pacific from Tahiti to Hawaii in a 60-foot former round-the-world racer.

Though she knew she could make use of her sailing experiences for this project as well as the reservoir of personal knowledge she had gained from her years of onshore visits in the Caribbean, she also realized the important role research would play. With her network of contacts built over the decades of visits, she has been able to interview dozens of people: shopkeepers, bar and restaurant proprietors, taxi drivers, faith and holistic healers, market vendors, police detectives, innkeepers, lawyers. For A Turquoise Grave, she studied the legal and political systems, court documents, and the unfolding political environment for building the new airport as well as its international political ramifications. For A Coffin Full of Pineapples, she read dozens of accounts of industrial agricultural practices and drug and weapons smuggling. Escorted visits to the high court, the morgue, the main jail and police substations, and the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital were helpful for both.

Hilary’s sailing and research trips to the Grenadines are ongoing. Most recently, she spent a month there shortly after Hurricane Beryl in February and March of 2025, getting a chance to see the devastation first hand but also having numerous opportunities to admire the resilience of islanders as they set about rebuilding their lives. For her next book in the series, tentatively due out in 2028, she is already deeply immersed in exploring the villages of Carriacou, interviewing notable island elders, and directly experiencing the unique carnival events that will become the heart of the third Maggie and Jake mystery.