The Brine at Low Tide

At six-fifteen on a black morning, a coast guard cutter drags a single searchlight across the tidal flats of Thornhaven Bay , and finds a dead man waiting at the foot of an abandoned lighthouse. The lighthouse keeper's ledger, half-buried in disturbed gravel, lists names, dates, and sums of money that were never meant to surface. By noon, Detective Sable is on the road, and every soul in the harbor town begins to count the cost of what they buried years ago. Marcus and Margot Venn, pillars of the local fishing fleet, discover that one transaction in the ledger bears their names. Brothers Callum and Remy Dray, estranged since a boatyard fire no one will discuss, are pulled back into the same orbit. Innkeeper Wren Ashford, journalist Priya, and town doctor Thomas Kell each carry a fragment of the truth , and a reason to keep it silent. As the tide recedes across the bay, the dead keep surfacing: drowned sailors, a vanished coast guard trainee named Patsy, a reclusive salvage diver called Foss, and a final victim whose name will force the whole town to choose between the law and the sea. The ledger does not accuse one person. It accuses an entire coastline. And in Thornhaven, the only thing more dangerous than what washed ashore is what the next low tide is about to drag back out.