Savage Vows

Sixty-five feet down off Raven's Point, Nora Parrish's dive light finds a wreck that is the wrong wreck. She has been hunting the Cormorant, a steel-hulled freighter that went down in a November squall in 1947 with a hold of silver ingots and a crew of seven. What her beam settles on instead is sixty feet of wooden fishing vessel, its pilothouse canted at a thirty-degree list, its planking bearded with anemones. In what is left of the captain's chair there is a skeleton. The rib cage has collapsed and the skull has rolled against the bulkhead, but the right arm is still articulated, and the hand points at a brass strongbox wedged under a fallen chart table. Then the current surges. And up on the surface, somebody has already cut her line. She comes up to a boat that will not run and a propeller that has been unbolted off the shaft. Declan O'Rourke finds her drifting, hauls her aboard, and gets accused of it for his trouble, because the cut line carries a splice his father taught half the harbour. His father has been dead three years. Nora's own father drew the Cormorant's coordinates on a napkin the night before the dive that killed him. Gus Hammett was his buddy that day. Gus came back. Her sister Jessie has been on the transplant list for fourteen months with lungs at thirty percent function, which is the entire reason Nora is in this water. The burner phone she brought up off the wreck lights up with a single message from a blocked number: *Find it or else.* A half-legible name in a waterlogged ledger turns out to be Silas Corbin, who owns half the waterfront property in Raven's Point and wears a gold pinky ring shaped like an anchor. What Nora and Declan strike is a fifty-fifty split, agreed between two people with every reason to distrust each other, over a wreck that has already killed one diver and that a developer is prepared to chase them across open water for. A closed-door small-town romantic suspense of commercial diving, harbour debts and a salvage nobody intends to let them keep.