Murder at Tidefall

About this book

An engineer who fell off a dam at 4 a.m. A river that has been saying no for a hundred and fifty years. And a renovation that isn't about energy at all.

Tidefall sits on the Sagasset River the way certain secrets sit in a small town — quietly, patiently, waiting for someone to ask the right question. Its mid-century dam cuts the water in a single uncompromising line. Concrete poured over something older. Something the original builders noticed and did not name.

Three years ago, city engineer Daniel Kelleher went down into the gallery during a night inspection and did not come back. The official report calls it an accident. The Sagasset has its own opinion.

SAM BLACKWOOD — retired homicide detective, reluctant witch, and the woman who has now worked five nodes along the eastern seaboard — receives a file she wasn't expecting. Sterling Vane found it misfiled under hydro investments. It should have been under foundational surveys. The difference cost Daniel Kelleher everything.

THE TEAM

⚙️ Rowan Ashby — geologist, the only person who can read legacy stonework and a renovation proposal simultaneously and explain, calmly and precisely, why both are wrong

🐾 Moss — who sits at the edge of the river and listens with his whole body, the way certain animals do when the ground beneath them is saying something

👻 Ezra — at the window, as always; dead for over a century and still the steadiest presence Sam knows; the ring is warm, and the fifth node is already pulling

📋 Clara Vane — chair of the Tidefall Historical Committee, part of the branch of her family that inherited the guilt and none of the money; she has been slowing this project down from inside the process, waiting for someone to arrive with better tools

THE MYSTERY

River Valley Energy Solutions wants to modernize the Tidefall dam. The paperwork is clean. The permits are in order. The company is a shell.

Several layers down, it resolves to the Coastal Historical Foundation.

The formation under the dam has been holding the Sagasset since before the state's records begin. It has been patient. So has Conrad Marsh.

And when Sam goes down into the gallery and puts her hand on the upstream wall — she feels three distinct beats. Not turbines. Not water pressure. Something that has been waiting, in the dark, for someone who knows how to listen.

Can Sam stop a renovation designed to look like progress — before the fifth node is silenced, and the river stops cooperating for good?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The dam sequences are some of the best writing in the series. Cold, precise, and completely unsettling." — ARC Reader

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Clara Vane is extraordinary. A woman fighting a war from inside enemy lines, one council vote at a time." — ARC Reader

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The moment Sam felt the three-beat pulse through the gallery wall — I put my hand on my own arm. I felt it too." — ARC Reader

Murder at Tidefall is Book 6 in The Moonhaven Mysteries series. Each book works as a standalone mystery, but the series rewards reading in order.

Perfect for fans of Angie Fox, Jenna St. James, Nellie H. Steele, and Adele Abbott — and anyone who loves their mysteries with atmosphere thick as river fog, ghosts who earn their keep, and a detective who knows that the most dangerous men are the ones with very clean paperwork.

The formation has been holding for a hundred and fifty years. The river remembers. Step inside and find out what it's been waiting to say.