It's September on Martha's Vineyard, and J.W. is contemplating the serious matter of a tree house for his children and some good fishing in the annual striped bass and bluefish derby with his friend, Boston lawyer Brady Coyne, who'll be on the island to help the elderly Sarah Fairchild write her will. J.W. has a little business, too, having reluctantly agreed to spend some of his valuable surf casting time trying to find a missing woman named Katherine Bannerman, who was last seen on the island a year ago.

For Brady and J.W. it'll be law and detecting during the day, but by night they will roam the far Vineyard beaches in search of prizewinning catches.

But soon another woman goes missing, a local bully threatens both Brady and J.W., and Brady discovers that more than a few people desperately crave his client's estate. With two hundred acres of pristine Vineyard land in a frail, elderly woman's control, the stakes are high.

For J.W., his case gets personal when someone slashes his wife's tires. As J.W. prowls the Vineyard's villages in search of the slasher and the two missing women and Brady defends his client's interests against an array of warring factions, the two friends come to suspect that a killer is loose on the island. What they do not know is that they themselves will soon be in danger. People are not always what they seem, and there are snakes under the rocks, even in Eden.

By turns charming and suspenseful, contemporary and evocative, First Light could only have been imagined in the collective mind of these two superb authors.