THE LAST FERRY

Four friends. One island. No way off.

Mike, Johnny, Joe, and Ed came to Cape Lookout, North Carolina, for a week of surf fishing - cold beer, big red drum, and the kind of quiet you can't find on the mainland. Eleven miles of sand and scrub, one road, no bridge, and the ferry as the only way home. Then the nor'easter hit. The ferry stopped running. And a mutilated body was found hanging on the lighthouse.

With the storm cutting them off from the mainland, the four friends realize a terrifying truth: everyone on the island is accounted for, which means the killer never left - because there was never any way off. As suspicion turns inward and old tensions surface, they discover the murder is tied to a killing buried six years ago, and to secrets one of them has been keeping for far longer.

The Last Ferry is a locked-island mystery about friendship, guilt, and the lies men tell each other to survive. Set against the wild Atlantic shoreline of Cape Lookout, where the weather turns on a dime and help is a storm away, it follows four ordinary men pushed to extraordinary lengths as they hunt for a killer in their midst - knowing that every answer only deepens the danger, and that on an island with no escape, the truth is the only way off.

Perfect for readers who love atmospheric mysteries, coastal settings, and stories where friendship itself becomes the final test.

Michael Anthony Murray writes from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, where he lives near the beach with his family. The Last Ferry draws on real surf-fishing trips to the North Carolina coast, and on the bonds between friends who have shared decades of tides, storms, and stories - bonds that hold, and break, when survival is on the line.