The Hollow Places
When Vivienne Ashworth receives a cryptic letter from the sister she hasn't spoken to in fifteen years, she has no choice but to return to Saltwick, a fog-bound coastal town where the lighthouse still keeps vigil over the salt marshes she once called home. What she finds is a place held captive by silence. Her sister Rosalind has vanished without explanation, and the locals answer her questions with careful, empty words. Old Theo Pendergast at the general store trades looks with fisherman Jonah Briggs. The sharp-eyed Maren Delacroix at the inn knows more than she admits. And in the cliffside homes of the Voss and Vale families, doors close a little too quickly when Vivienne's name comes up. As she retraces Rosalind's final days with the reluctant help of journalist Nell Pendergast, Vivienne uncovers a network of secrets threaded through the town's prominent families, ties that bind Aldric Voss, Edmund Vale, and Oliver Halloran in ways the official records will never show. In the hollow places, an abandoned lighthouse keeper's cottage, a sea cave revealed only at low tide, the gaps between ledgers and whispered memory, she discovers that Saltwick has been hiding something for decades, and that her own family sits at its dark center. With a storm bearing down on the headland and a stranger, Jonas Crane, asking questions of his own, the clock is closing in. Vivienne must untangle the lies before the tide turns and the town's secrets are buried forever. But some truths, once unearthed, refuse to stay quiet. And someone in Saltwick is already willing to do whatever it takes to keep them silent.