The Drowning Ledger

When Maren Voss steps off the ferry at Carrick Point, the lake air hits her like a memory she's spent ten years trying to outrun. Her sister drowned in these waters. The coroner called it an accident. The town called it a shame. Maren called it a lie , and she's come home to prove it. But Carrick Point doesn't welcome its ghosts. Deputy Colton Reeve warns her off before she's cleared the dock. DA Halvorsen's office has no record worth pursuing. Even her old friend Nell Corvath flinches at the questions Maren can't stop asking. The lake gives up its dead slowly, and the people who've built lives along its shore have learned not to look too closely at what floats beneath. Then the ledger surfaces , waterlogged, half-buried in marsh mud, its pages dense with dates, figures, and initials. A private accounting, kept for years, linking payments to disappearances. Names that should be strangers turn out to be neighbors. Casualties once dismissed as accidents now read like line items in someone else's long, patient crime. As Maren follows the ledger's trail from the boatyards to the church where Sister Anouk hears too many confessions, she draws the attention of Cassius Vane, a powerful local whose family has owned half the shoreline for generations. The deeper she digs, the more the lake closes around her , and the more certain she becomes that her sister's name appears nowhere in those pages. Which means someone went to great lengths to keep it that way. The ledger is almost full. Maren has one entry left to write , her own, or the truth. And in a town that has drowned its secrets for a decade, the difference between those two things may be the only choice she gets to make.