Otter Coast

Otter Coast: A Medical Marijuana Mystery is #2 of an ecofiction trilogy with love, mystery and adventure, exploring the intersections of design, ethics and the forces that shape our lives. Read standalone or in a series. It was shortlisted in the American Legacy Book Award in the Visionary Fiction category, and its predecessor, #1 in the series, The Erenwine Agenda: A Hydraulic Fracturing Love Story, was shortlisted by the International Book Award in the same category.

Perfect for readers of All the Water in the World (Eiren Caffall), The Hunter (Tana French), and The Last Animal (Ramona Ausubel), this novel carries the atmospheric suspense of Smilla's Sense of Snow (Peter Høeg), and the spiritual depth of Queen of Dreams (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni) and Dwellings (Linda Hogan).

Amalia Sengupta Erenwine is balancing relationship strain, a looming trip to India with her parents, and the everyday pressures of New York City when the story opens. Beneath all of it runs a quieter, older pull she can't quite name-something stirred by family history and the weight of what she's about to return to. It's a tension that follows her into the choices she makes next. In India, she moves through grief, ritual, and family expectations that leave her seeing her own life with a sharper, more complicated clarity.

She escapes the city for a road trip with her friend, Reverend Mildred McCaine - a minister preparing a community panel on medical marijuana and wrestling with her own crisis of faith. What begins as a journey of good intentions becomes a deeper reckoning as the two women confront the stories they've carried about family, purity, purpose and the past. In Mildred's childhood town, long‑buried memories, shifting spiritual ground and an enigmatic artifact surface, challenging both women to reconsider what it means to be true to oneself.

As their journey pulls them farther from the familiar, Amalia begins to sense the world tilting at its edges-visions, altered states, and the pressure of landscape revealing truths she has long avoided. In the shifting light of coastal Maine, memory behaves like weather: unpredictable, charged, and full of undertow. What rises to meet them is not just Mildred's past, but a deeper, more elusive presence that blurs intuition and reality, urging Amalia toward a reckoning with grief, identity, and the fragile bonds that hold a life together.

A reflective, character‑driven ecofiction novel about friendship, memory and the delicate work of becoming whole.