Salt and static

Two years ago, on a night of storm, Maren Tulloch took the Mayday that sent the lifeboat to the wrong side of the island. Four fishermen drowned. Her husband walked up to the radio relay on the north headland and never came home.

Now, on another storm-wracked night, the dead trawler is calling again.

Same voice. Same minute: 23:47. But a different position, and this time a boy is shouting about lights in the dark.

The insurance company doesn't believe in ghosts. It believes Fraser Tulloch is alive, and that his widow knows it. Investigator Jonah Penhale, an ex-Navy clearance diver who has made a career of finding the men who aren't dead, is sent to the Isle of Tornsay to prove the whole thing is a fraud.

But the calls keep coming. Someone has slashed his tyres. The island is closing ranks. And the only person who seems to want the truth as badly as he does is the woman he was sent to expose.

To find out what really happened, Maren and Jonah will have to find the boat, down in the cold dark water off Seal Skerry where nobody has ever looked. Somebody on Tornsay has spent two years making sure that never happens.

Atmospheric, slow-burning and full of twists, Salt and Static is a romantic suspense novel of grief, guilt and second chances, set on a Hebridean island where the drowned don't call, and the living do.

📖 315 pages