Gullmouth Bay is ablaze with its Endless Light festival—LEDs over Mariner Street, projection art on cannery walls, a lantern parade at dusk—but a brutal killing snaps the power to the party. Eli Navarro, licensed electrician and volunteer keeper of Harridan Point Lighthouse, expects a weekend of rewiring temperamental stages and hauling cable. Instead, at dawn he finds a body sealed inside a neon maze on the beach, a fused breaker panel still humming beside it.
When his sister and business partner, Rosa, who leased generators to the event, becomes the prime suspect, Eli is pulled into a circuit of lies. The suspect list crackles: hotheaded glassblower Kira Voss; secretive venture sponsor Quinn Lemaire; muralist-in-debt Daisy Calder; and drone videographer Owen Pike, who never seems to land. Each guards a contract clause, a quiet payoff, or a grudge scrawled in phosphor. With tourism dollars, his shop's reputation, and his family on the line, Eli traces power logs, shipping invoices marked ILLUMEX, and security feeds from Harridan Pier to a storm-battered boathouse. To clear Rosa, he must unmask the saboteur before Gullmouth Bay goes dark—and the next body drops. Twisty, wry, and charged with small-town sparks, Endless Light delivers sharp surprises and stubborn heart.
Endless Light flickers with questions about who powers a place and who gets paid. The festival is spectacle, but Eli's work spotlights maintenance, repair, and the invisible systems that keep neighbors fed.
The motifs are clean: loops, feedback, breakers, even the lighthouse as a moral resistor. I loved how the story keeps asking whether art, commerce, and care can share the same circuit "before the lights go out." It left me thinking about community power long after the last lantern.
El festival en Gullmouth Bay vibra como un mapa de luces, y el libro aprovecha cada foco y cable para levantar atmósfera. El faro de Harridan Point, los escenarios caprichosos, el boathouse golpeado por tormentas y hasta el zumbido de un panel crean un litoral que se siente real y peligroso.
Más allá del brillo, se nota la precariedad de una comunidad que apuesta por turismo y contratos opacos. Ese contraste hace que el crimen importe, y que el clímax se sienta ganado.
Eli Navarro is my favorite kind of sleuth, stubborn, decent, and wired into the town's guts. His day job isn't a gimmick; it's the key that lets him read the festival like a circuit.
I loved the sibling dynamic. Rosa is no damsel, and every scene between them hums with history, pride, and the kind of bickering that only makes sense when the stakes are huge.
The suspects pop. Kira's heat, Quinn's polished hush, Daisy's hungry talent, Owen's restless drift. Each one sparked a different theory, and I kept flipping back to clues to see how the currents might cross.
And oh, the setting. LEDs strung over salt-stiff streets, the lighthouse beam cutting dawn haze, a maze of neon that looks like art until it doesn't. I could smell wet wire and tide.
By the time Eli traces the pattern through logs and invoices, I was grinning at the ingenuity and aching for these people who live on the edge of spectacle. This is sharp, humane, and electric. Five shining stars.
The novel routes its energy through tidy chapters that braid fieldwork with documentary shards: power logs, invoices, security clips. Navarro's trade expertise enriches the prose without turning it into a manual; the jargon is brisk, metaphors stay in the electrical lane, and the banter has a dry curl. A minor snag in the last sprint, where two clue-threads bunch, but the structure holds and the lights stay on.
Smart, wired crime set amid a flickering festival as Eli tracks breaker logs and a humming panel toward a reveal that lands clean while town politics keep the current unpredictable.
