Between Times

A whodunit set on New Hampshire’s seacoast.

It might look like the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, but the setting for this work of fiction is called the Smythe Hotel. There unwinds a tale of mystery and murder that spans two worlds — worlds that exist decades apart.

In the book “Sumner Island” [Publishing Works Inc., $24.95] author Michael Cormier takes the main character — Mitch or Jerry, depending upon which time period he happens to be in — through what is called “a tear in the membrane” or an “earthly wormhole” back to 1924.

In that year at that hotel Maria Boudreau — young, beautiful, wealthy and sought-after — is attacked in her room and left to die in the resulting fire.

The story is a classic whodunit, except for the added interest of Mitch/Jerry following clues — and Maria — from one time to the other and back again. The to-ing and fro-ing gets a little tiresome, but Cormier writes well and his long descriptive passages paint pictures that hold your interest.

The unusual plot stretches credulity at points, but then it is a book about transprogression, where instead of being reincarnated into a new life, the book explains, “the same life is reborn someplace else or sometime else into the same person.”

As it says in the book, “Got it?”