Christopher Mirabile Sends Police Chief Silas Lopez Back to Cape Cod in “The Holdfast”

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Christopher Mirabile has published "The Holdfast," the second novel in his Silas Lopez mystery series, following a police chief transplanted from the American Southwest to the seaside town of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The book picks up with an elderly homeowner’s death that initially looks natural but isn’t. According to the announcement, Lopez’s investigation uncovers fraudulent paperwork, corporate shells and illicit property transactions reaching into the fabric of the Cape Cod community he now polices. The publisher describes the novel as pairing procedural suspense with a broader look at integrity, loyalty and what makes a place worth defending.

Lopez, a former ranch hand recast as a small-town police chief, is a recurring device for Mirabile: a protagonist whose Western values clash with the unfamiliar customs of a New England coastal setting. The author has said the character grew out of his own time in the Southwest and years hiking the Cape Cod National Seashore, and that dual geography shapes both books in the series.

Rather than pursuing formal creative writing training, Mirabile arrived at fiction through careers in law and business. He’s a magna cum laude English graduate of Colgate University who trained as a lawyer at Boston College, then spent decades as an attorney, executive and startup investor before writing six nonfiction books. "The Holdfast" continues the fiction turn he made with the first Silas Lopez novel. He lives in Provincetown itself, the setting for the series, with his wife and three dogs.

"The Holdfast" is published by Slack Tide Press and distributed by Bublish, Inc., and is out now in eBook ($4.99), paperback ($19.99) and hardcover ($29.99) through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other major retailers. Early trade notices, including from BookLife by Publishers Weekly and Reader Views, have described it as a well-constructed mystery that escalates tension while maintaining the procedural authenticity that anchored the first book.

Studio CarryOnHarry will be curious whether Lopez’s fish-out-of-water premise deepens into something more particular to Provincetown’s real estate and preservation pressures over the course of the series, rather than functioning mainly as a mystery backdrop.

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