What the Tide Returns

Margot Delaney has spent her career cataloguing other people's lives. But when a letter arrives informing her that she's inherited her great-aunt Vera's cliffside cottage on a remote island in Penobscot Bay, even her careful habits can't prepare her for the ferry ride across forty-seven moored boats into the life she left behind. The cottage is cold. The locals are colder. And the stranger standing on the dock, Jude Ashford, lean and watchful, with his sister Nell at his side, insists he has no business being there, even though the windows of Margot's inheritance show signs of long habitation. An islander's discretion is its own currency, and Widow Marlowe, the sharp-eyed keeper of the general store, trades Margot's questions for half-answers and old legend. Something happened to Daniel Pierce the night the ferry ran aground. Inspector Whitfield, still traveling up from the mainland for a case everyone pretends is closed, is asking questions no one wants answered. Margot came to Maine to settle an estate. She stays because the sea keeps giving up its dead. As she falls deeper into both the mystery and the quiet, scarred man at the center of it, she faces a choice that will unravel more than she came for: pursue the truth Jude has spent years burying, or board the next ferry and let the tide take it all back.