Everything the Water Hid

Thirty-nine years ago, the cargo ship Meridian went down in a storm off Halcyon Sound, and the official report called it bad luck. Elena Voss has spent her career as a maritime archaeologist proving that wrecks don't lie — she just never expected the next storm to hand her the one wreck she'd give anything not to have to examine: her own father's.

When a record gale shifts the silt off Cormorant Reef and exposes new wreckage from the Meridian, the county calls in Saltmark Marine Recovery to run the dive. Its owner, Cole Hargrove, has his own reason to want the truth about that ship: his brother died investigating it three years ago, in an "accident" Cole has never believed.

What the wreck gives up doesn't match the manifest. Buried in the hold is cargo the Meridian was never declared to carry — and a paper trail that ties a decades-old smuggling operation directly to a name everyone in Halcyon Sound trusts. As Elena and Cole dig deeper, working a case that keeps circling back to both their families, they become the one thing the people behind that name can't afford to have looking too closely — and the storm that uncovered the truth is about to be used to bury it again, with them still in the water.

EVERYTHING THE WATER HID is Book One of the Saltmark Series: a slow-burn romantic suspense about the wrecks we spend our lives trying to raise, and the ones we're better off leaving down there — until we can't.