A couple’s luxury vacation in the Maldives takes a sinister turn when they’re befriended by two strangers in a twisty and darkly comic novel by the author of Friends in Napa.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Incidentals by Sheila Yasmin Marikar, which releases on March 31st 2026.
Sarah and Sam have lost the very spark that brought them together. In an effort to save their marriage, they embark on an anniversary trip to the Maldives where a week at a luxury resort might remind them of why they fell in love. On the plane, they meet Krista and Kevin, a happy older, exceptionally generous couple headed to the same destination and eager to make vacation friends. They could be just the marriage mentors Sarah and Sam need.
But when a dead body is pulled from the crystalline waters only days into the vacation, a dark pall is cast over the sunny coral isles. The official story is a tragic accident. But that doesn’t sit right with Sarah, who senses something off. What could these very wealthy, too-fast friends possibly want from a modest couple like them?
The answers could destroy what’s left of her marriage. Then again, a murder in the Maldives might be the best thing that ever happened to it.
Your boarding pass, please?
Sarah blinks up at the woman behind the reception desk of the Emirates Lounge at Los Angeles International Airport. Her boarding pass? Doesn’t Sam have it? Sam holds on to all of their documents when they travel together, a vestige from their first trip abroad, so long ago now that her memory of the trip itself has grown mold. But when she turns to her husband, he gives her a look of barely concealed exasperation.
That’s when she remembers. She insisted on holding on to her own boarding pass and passport. “We’re not having a repeat of London,” she’d said, before they left home. “Not after what happened last time.”
Last time. As if Sam needed reminding of what had happened the last time they’d embarked on a big international flight, London to Los Angeles, when he had gotten so drunk in the Virgin Atlantic lounge that he had been denied boarding. You have to be really drunk to be denied boarding a flight out of London. It was beyond embarrassing. And he had had the folio with both of their passports, embossed with their initials, an engagement gift from his uncle, so when he was carted off to the Heathrow holding cell—he’d resisted arrest—Sarah was left to languish at the gate.
She had to bring it up. She knew how much he hated to be reminded of that incident. He’d apologized until the word “sorry” lost meaning, devolved to a sludge of syllables. What could he do? The cops were racist. “They have a thing against us, babe, you know that, it’s baked in,” he’d told her pleadingly, in the airport Hilton that he’d checked them into upon his release eight hours later. He had thought that they could get a bottle of Champagne and toast to twenty-four more hours in their favorite city on the planet—well, his, anyway—albeit in a suburb an hour outside of London and not London proper. A minor aberration, nothing a little bubbly couldn’t wash away. There had to be good chicken tikka masala by the airport. They loved chicken tikka masala.
But no. She’d paced a semicircle around the bed with the too-starched sheets, refusing to look him in the eye, let alone drink the Perrier-Jouët sloshing around the cheap plastic ice bucket, sweating all over the laminate hutch.
Now, in front of the receptionist guarding access to the Emirates Lounge, Sarah presses her lips together in apology and rifles through her nylon carryall. It has been specifically designed for travel, has eighteen compartments with which to organize your laptop, chargers, identification, and personal items, and she uses exactly none of them. At the bottom of the bag, boarding passes from trips past overlap with one another, mottled by time and spilled liquids, like leaves on a forest floor.
Coming up empty, she pats herself down. It’s not in the pockets of her cargo pants (there are seven). Not in the side pockets of her oversized denim jacket. Finally, she finds the boarding pass in the right breast pocket, crumpled up, the long ends seemingly stuck together.
As she attempts to uncrumple it, a wad of gum reveals itself, yawning wide.
The receptionist turns down her mouth. Sam puts his head in his hand.
“Sorry,” Sarah says, picking the gum off, rolling it into a ball, and shoving it into yet another pocket. She’s not normally a gum chewer, but the Uber driver offered. She tells herself that she’ll remember to throw it out, she won’t forget.
She presents the sullied boarding pass to the receptionist, who holds a barcode scanner a good foot above the offending document and waves them toward the long entrance corridor with a flap of her hand. Sarah can feel Sam’s eyes on her as they wheel their suitcases down the hall.
“Can you not?” she says, not looking in his direction. She knows she ought to do better. Be more of an adult. She’s almost forty, she’s too old to act like this, in theory. But gum on a boarding pass is nothing compared to the way that he made a fool of them both at Heathrow. The way he continues to make a fool of them, if she’s being honest.
Sam knows he should pick his battles, their couples counselor has said as much. “It just might be easier, if you were a little more organized—”
“I said, can you not?”
Sam exhales roughly and fixes his gaze on a white podium up ahead. There’s a plastic bucket of Champagne on top of it, Krug Grande Cuvée, sublime stuff by airport lounge standards. The uniformed woman behind it is smiling at him, smiling in a way his wife never smiles anymore.
She holds out a glass. Sam thanks her as he accepts it. He can feel Sarah’s side-eye.
“You haven’t eaten anything,” she says.
“We’re on vacation,” he says. “Besides, you know that I never eat before noon.” Why does he feel the need to justify himself, he wonders. He paid for their tickets. Well—credit card points and airline miles paid for their tickets. Their combined points and miles. But he knows how to catalog, monetize, and deploy them to make the most of their value. Sarah can’t be bothered, Sarah with her journalist boondoggles and free hotel stays and la-di-da, everything-will-work-out-because-the-universe-decrees-it attitude.
Well. Sarah used to have that attitude. For the past year, it’s like a black cloud has swallowed her up, turned her into Sad-rah, a nickname Sam uses in his head and his head alone, because if his wife ever heard it, she would rip him to shreds like a notice from the IRS.
He knows that he has played a part in her depression—if that is, indeed, what it is; she refuses to see a therapist despite his suggestions (which have been gentle, maybe overly so). He feels, frankly, awful. He wants them to be further along. In a house instead of a condominium in the not-so-glamorous part of Hollywood, on a side street a stone’s throw away from the Walk of Fame and its attendant tourists and vagrants. With a family on the horizon. With the sort of discretionary income that would allow them to not liquidate all their points and miles to take a last-ditch, if-we-can’t-make-it-here, we-can’t-make-it-anywhere trip to save their marriage.
He has never been to the Maldives, but from what he understands, it’s tough to be mad when you’re surrounded by a bathwater-warm lagoon the color of a midsummer sky. Tough but not impossible, and he is not confident that they won’t argue during the seven nights to come, nine if you count the travel there and back.
Which is why he sprung for business-class tickets on Emirates. The business-class cabin of Emirates has a bar, a semicircular, gleaming (according to the photos he’s clicked through online more times than he’d care to count) mahogany bar staffed with chignoned flight attendants who, in acknowledgment of the fact that you’ve paid upward of $10,000—or the equivalent in points and miles—for access to the cabin, will happily shake you one, three, five, however many martinis you’d like over the course of the sixteen-hour flight to Dubai and the four-hour connection from Dubai to Malé. He knows he can easily take down seven (martinis, not flight attendants, he stopped playing that game when he and Sarah got serious), but he also knows that Sarah will be watching and judging, and that he should probably use some of the in-flight hours to sleep, because there will be a resplendent bar at the lounge in Dubai, where they have a layover, and he’d like to avail himself of that, too.
Is he an alcoholic? Define “alcoholic.”
Copyright © 2026 by Sheila Yasmin Marikar. From INCIDENTALS by Sheila Yasmin Marikar. Reprinted by permission of Little A, a division of Amazon Publishing.
