Spiraling from the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. A gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, it is at once gritty and hedonistic, beautiful and complex.
Boston comic Mark Winslow arrives with his troupe of improv actors ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the regionaseared by drought and caught in the culture waraare anything but peaceful this summer. Does the tall ship in the harbor bear an unusually large number of Scandinavian tourists? If not, who are the blond and ragged people insisting they are associated with it?
Then a public fight makes Mark the prime suspect in the grisly butchering of a Boston blueblood. Mark believes his choice is simple: find the killer or be charged with the crime.
Amid the clam shacks and craft shops, art galleries and nude beaches, undercurrents are pulling at the surface of normality, like riptides beneath seemingly calm water. Could the disappearance of a famous painter 80 years in the pastaand the story of his masterpiece, The Fisher Boyasomehow lie at the center of the whirlpool of evil threatening to extinguish Markas life? The Fisher Boy is Stephen Anableas debut novel.