Pirate's Curse

The bloom came in October, the color of rust on the water of Admiralty Inlet.

Dr. Talia Freymann has tracked toxic algae on the Olympic Peninsula for years. She knows what saxitoxin does to a nervous system. She does not know why the dead water draws a line across the Inlet that no current explains, why the townspeople of Port Townsend have started standing along the seawall at night, or why they all face the same way.

Then she hauls a lead-sealed chest out of the silt at the bottom of the hardest tide on the coast. Inside are a hand-tinted chart from 1794, a ledger of the dead, and forty-eight bars of Canton trade silver. The ledger holds a covenant, and it has been waiting for its Heir.

The debt is owed in silver, and it descends in blood. It can only be answered over water, at the turn of the tide, before the route closes against the open sea. The clock is the moon, and the moon is full on Monday.

Pirate's Curse: The Ledger of Admiralty Inlet is Pacific Northwest Gothic horror at its coldest. It follows a scientist's reckoning with a debt two centuries old, in a drowned town where the land remembers everything.