The Stillness Beneath the Ice
A body surfaces in a frozen harbor grotto, and only the people who never leave can tell you who put it there. Maren Ellsworth has come back to the northern settlement of her childhood for the first time in years, intending only to care for her aging parent through the long winter. The kettle has barely whistled on her second morning home when a fisherman hauling traps beneath the wharf finds something tangled in the line that is not a fish. By noon the harbor is cordoned with rope, and Deputy Cass Riplee is asking questions that nobody in town seems willing to answer. Drawn reluctantly into the inquiry, Maren finds herself circling the same frozen docks as Dara Quinley, a woman whose family has fished these waters for generations and whose quiet grief runs deeper than the new ice. The longer she stays, the more Maren realizes that the settlement's stillness is not peace but preservation , a silence the residents maintain around old accidents, old debts, and one old disappearance the harbor has never quite given up. With the ice thickening, the inns filling with strangers who arrived by the last ferry, and Innkeeper Jonas Veer nursing secrets of his own, the truth will not stay submerged. Maren must decide whether to surface it herself or let the settlement freeze over the way it always has , quiet, beautiful, and incomplete.