Secret Bay

In Seward, Alaska, the tides keep their own secrets—and so do the people who live by them.

Secret Bay follows four lives woven together by saltwater, found family, and the hope that love can wash away the past.

Ginny makes videos for a tribal organization over winter and pulls in the net on the family seiner when salmon return. She’s hyper-observant, the person you want in a crisis, but the one person she’s never been able to outrun finds her again, forcing her to keep hiding the parts of herself that still shake. Learning to speak the hard words out loud, claiming the right to feel safe—these storms she must battle on her own. Or so she tells herself.

Justin grew up with what he thought was stability, and loved it. He cooks and mends nets with the same careful patience he brings to his marriage. But patience has a pressure point. As their fishing season approaches, Ginny’s white lies snag just under the surface. Justin has to decide what love and life might be like when you stop pretending you’re not hurt.

Across the creek, Justin’s twin, Case, is offered a job that could alter the future of wild salmon in Southcentral Alaska: repurpose hatcheries, rewrite policy, and make peace between people who know the water by heart. He’s brilliant at strategy and terrible at not meddling when someone he loves is in trouble.

Chelsea, his first love, his match in nerve and generosity, is transforming her house and her world, but she can’t keep his old bruises from flaring when he learns sees an unexpected face from Ginny’s past confront her.

There are walls to tear down and rebuilt into something better everywhere you turn. An office to rebuild as Case steps into leadership, with Tessa—brilliant, exacting, endearingly odd—helping. Ginny’s videos carry tribal elders’ voices farther than a boardroom ever could, while Pete, the father who knows the ocean by its moods, pulls his Xtratufs on for one more season.

This is a story about what happens after the big romantic gestures—when the real work begins. It’s about the relief of saying the scary thing out loud and finding, to your shock, that you’re still loved. It’s about taking off the armor you thought you needed to survive and discovering it was keeping you from feeling the warmth surrounding you. It’s about Alaska, in all its blunt reality: diesel and coffee in a dawn harbor, spruce needles in your hair, a wind that stings and then clears your head. You’ll visit a place that tourism ads miss—the break rooms, galley tables, and gravel pullouts where the grit of life actually gets dealt with.

If you loved the fierce landscapes and found-family pull of The Simple Wild, the shadowed histories and hard-won hope of The Great Alone, or the small-town intimacy and workplace sparks of Nora Roberts’ Northern Lights and the Chesapeake Bay novels, Secret Bay will hit you in that same tender place—while offering something singular: an insider’s view of commercial salmon fishing and a nuanced look at tribal conservation work that’s as timely as it is heartfelt.

Feel your shoulders drop as you breathe clean crisp air and listen to waves lap the gravel shore. Find out what it costs, and what you get back, when you choose trust over control. Stay up late because you have to know if a marriage can outpace a storm, if brothers can unravel an old family secret, if a woman who’s always run can finally stand still. Secret Bay is the eighth book in The Thunder Bay Seiner Series, rich with returning faces, but welcoming new readers like a hot mug placed in your hands.

Pull on your rain gear and find a place on deck. The tide’s turning.