Diane Woods, sole detective in the police department of Tyler, N.H., privately welcomes the unofficial assistance of magazine writer Lewis Cole during what amounts to a crime wave in the coastal town. Soon after an unidentified corpse, buried decades ago, is unearthed by a developer's backhoe, Lynn Germano, a waitress at the local diner, is found strangled in the ``prime beachfront cottage'' she rented. Felix Tinios, an acquaintance of Cole's who works freelance for organized crime, dismisses the Germano murder as amateurish. But when Cole just misses being on a boat that explodes, killing the fisherman who said he had info about the strangling, and then finds a molotov cocktail on his property, he doubts his source's veracity. First-novelist DuBois, an Edgar nominee for short fiction, spreads references to Cole's earlier departure from the Department of Defense in Nevada, which left the agency uneasy and him permanently wary, throughout the story. The narrative scraps of Cole's past mix with secret histories of current players in the coastal mysteries to yield a somewhat overstuffed tale. But DuBois continues to show promise; maybe Cole's next appearance will deliver on it. (May)