The Tide

Twelve strangers check into a luxury grief retreat on the Oregon coast.

By the third night, one of them is dead.

The police call it an accident. Documentary editor Audrey Lam calls it a lie.

She saw the dead woman's face at dinner. That wasn't the face of someone about to drown. That was the face of someone who had made a decision.

Now Audrey is trapped inside a retreat where nobody is allowed to leave and an investigation that nobody asked her to conduct. Her fellow guests include a carpenter whose emotional honesty is slightly terrifying, a chef who feeds everyone but herself, an architect who builds metaphors because the truth would demolish him, a marine biologist who processes grief at a volume that could wake the ocean, and a retired librarian whose pie crust recipe requires rage and cold butter.

Every guest is grieving a spouse. Every guest is hiding something about the marriage they lost. And the therapist running the program has a secret of her own, one that connects her to the dead woman in ways that no professional license can excuse.

As Audrey follows the evidence from a teacup on a nightstand to a photograph in a silver frame to a confession in a library at the end of a hallway, she discovers that the most dangerous person in the building is the one she trusts most.

And the truth about the murder will force her to confront the truth about her own marriage, the secret she has carried for eleven months, and the three seconds that changed everything.

The Tide is the first novel in The Retreat series. Each book follows a new group of guests at a different location, each harboring different secrets, each confronting a death that is not what it seems.