Sea of Coins

In 1850, the British opium clipper Falcon runs aground off the California North Coast. Abandoned by her crew, she sinks to the floor of a wave-tossed cove. 160 years later, a young woman diving with a friend discovers one last item left by plundering divers—what she thinks is a silver belt buckle. From that moment on, her life is never the same.


When Hermosa Perry's older brother Robert mysteriously dies, she goes back home to her mother's house near Almadina, a village and art colony on the coast north of San Francisco. Janis Evelyn Dunn Perry—“Jed” Perry to her friends and the admirers of her paintings—has fallen into one of her multitudes of depressed phases, and Hermosa has no choice but to take charge.


Dealing with her own problems—a boyfriend having an affair, a sprained ankle, grief for her brother—Hermosa finds herself facing the puzzle of her brother's death: suspected foul play. 


To complicate things, she renews the friendship of a man she knew in high school. Hal Iddings is a handsome carpenter and cabinet maker. Their attraction blooms into an affair, which eases Hermosa's growing anxiety about what her brother’s probably illegal activities.


But the mystery is complicated by Hermosa's own fractured family history. She learns she has a half-sister she never knew she had, Catalina, erased from family mementos by her own mother, Jed Perry. The tangle tightens as Jed relates the legend of a curse on her first husband Crispin Dunn's family laid by Xanthus, a god of the sea.


This belief penetrates the minds of several Almadina denizens: Catalina, who fears for her son; Ondine, owner of a tarot card and herbals shop; and Phoebe Iddings, Hal's mother. They believe that Xanthus is looking for sacrifice, and will not stop taking Dunn son's until he gets the thing he desires returned: the silver clasp lost from his sea cloak.


Hermosa begins to fear that the “buckle” she has kept all these years, is that clasp.