Emily White lives with her grandmother, Charlotte, in a somnolent whaling village at the end of Point Road in Westport, Massachusetts-where nothing much ever happens. The year is 1861. Civil War has broken out between North and South and some in town have heeded the call for service to their country. Yet, life at Point Village continues with a quiet routine. Emily loves living in Point Village and finds her adventures in books. She is a dedicated member of the Drift River Readers Club, which has recently taken up a book about the suicide death and hanging of Sarah Cornell in Tiverton, Rhode Island-an incident which occurred many years previous. Emily believes that the Club should investigate the thirty-year-old hanging. In her virtuous endeavor to solve the Cornell mystery, the mission at hand becomes derailed when a servant girl is found hanged on a nearby island and her passing regarded as a suicide. Death has become a tormenting companion for Emily and she is determined to solve this crime. As circumstances unfold, the Drift River Readers Club is assigned a puzzle they cannot ignore when one of their members becomes the prey, and the war in the south moves north, complicating things and drawing Emily into the conflict. Follow Emily and Samuel Cory as they set out to sea on the grand schooner Sphinx to unravel a murder and rescue a friend from being the next possible victim.