A Mystery
By Michael Salmieri
A body in the water. A dock full of secrets. And a storm closing in.
At dawn on the final Saturday of August, Sylvia Ashworth is pulled from the water beside her boat at Lighthouse Point Marina. The police see a tragic accident. But Rock Trotta knows something they don’t: the breaker supplying Sylvia’s boat was switched off by hand.
On S Dock, the retirees, tradespeople, liveaboards, and weekend boaters are more than neighbors. They are a mismatched family—loyal, quarrelsome, and certain they know one another. When the official investigation overlooks crucial details and settles too quickly on a suspect, the residents begin asking questions of their own.
Soon, old grudges surface, carefully constructed alibis begin to crack, and the questions Sylvia was asking before her death threaten more than one comfortable life.
Time is running out. Labor Day will empty the marina and scatter the witnesses, and a powerful coastal storm is bearing down on the Jersey Shore, ready to wash away whatever evidence remains.
To discover what happened on S Dock, this close-knit community must decide how much truth it can survive, and whether protecting one of its own means exposing another.
A Murder on S Dock is an atmospheric, character-driven mystery about loyalty, guilt, found family, and the dangerous truths hiding in plain sight.
Michael Salmieri is a Pennsylvania-based author of character-driven thrillers that blend suspense, intrigue, and moral complexity. His novels range across crime, politics, espionage, technology, and institutional power, following people caught between duty, survival, and the consequences of the choices they make.
As a public adjuster and business consultant, he has spent his professional life navigating conflict, weighing competing accounts, and looking beyond the accepted version of events. That experience informs his fiction through layered plots, credible pressure, and characters whose decisions matter as much as the dangers confronting them.
