Graveyard Shore - Tom Edge, #1

As his on-again/off-again girlfriend likes to say, Tom Edge has moved from one graveyard to another- from the Graveyard of the Pacific as a US Coast Guard Intelligence Service officer, to the Graveyard of the Atlantic as sheriff. He's traded a long and storied career with the USCG IS for the life of a sheriff in a coastal North Carolina county that's half underwater, with a population that grows exponentially during the Outer Banks tourist season, and boasts a beach for a highway.
The protected-by-law wild horses living in the dunes and trotting up and down that road with immunity have been here since the time of the Spanish Conquistadores. Edge has been here only a year or two and already it seems like a lifetime. Tom Edge is used to things washing up on the beach. Everything from driftwood, to trash, to seaweed, to flotsam from the countless ships washed up on county shores.
There's even the unfortunate drowning now and again. So he's not terribly surprised to hear that a dead body has landed on his beach. But this corpse turns out to have been the victim of foul play. That changes everything. The victim was a motel manager with a sketchy past, including a history of a minor run in or two with the law, and a not-so-grieving widow. Altogether a fairly unremarkable man.
Except for his death. Edge's team includes a by-the-book second-in-command, a sharp and foul-mouthed captain who thinks she can manhandle the world into submission, and a French-speaking assistant who can't seem to get Edge's job title straight. This former Coast Guard man may have come to the Carolina coast to escape his past and his own personal demons, but he is about to learn that solving this murder just might push him over the edge.