A woman uses her sense of sand to find her family who vanished at sea—and uncovers buried secrets.
In this suspenseful psychological thriller from #1 bestselling author Courtney Hargrove, a woman uses her sense of sand to find her family who vanished at sea—and the deeper she digs, the more buried secrets she uncovers in the coastal New England town of Sandburn.
Isla Banks is a New York-based television news producer who grew up in the sand, spending her childhood playing on the beach in Sandburn, Massachusetts and helping her father Nick, son of a long line of commercial clammers, dig up a living on the mudflats.
When Isla’s father and her new husband vanish on a boat trip to the pub in calm waters during a visit back home to Sandburn, the Coast Guard and local police launch a massive search with the help of the local fishing community, but find no sign of the men apart from Nick Banks’s drifting skiff.
Locals urge Isla to move on, but she believes foul play led to the disappearance of her family—and suspects a mysterious woman who’s moved into the town’s most luxurious beach house is involved. When Isla’s husband Clive, a Dutch expatriate, suddenly reappears and warns her they’re both in danger, she must use her unique sense of sand—how it’s transferred on bodies and objects, its unique properties and variations, how it preserves traces of evidence left behind by unwitting perpetrators—to solve the mystery and save herself.
With the help of her hometown ex-boyfriend Ben Cassidy, also a clammer and Sandburn’s Harbormaster, Isla unravels a tangled web of lies, deceit and betrayal that upends her life and ultimately leads to murder. As she comes closer to solving the mystery, Isla must face secrets from her own past and reckon with the brutal realization that the people we love aren't always who we want them to be.
For fans of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow.
Book 2 in the Expatriate Mysteries series.
