What the Tide Brought In

About this book

The tide has brought Maren Trevena driftwood, drowned crabs, and a lifetime of goodbyes. It has never, until tonight, brought her a man — one who breathes seawater, flinches at the church bell, and bears the mark of her grandmother's most forbidden spell burned over his heart.

Maren is the last tide-witch of Saltkettle, a fog-wrapped little cove the world has all but forgotten. She keeps her grandmother's apothecary, brews salt-charms and grief-salves for a dwindling town, and lives by one hard-won rule: everything she loves goes out on the tide and never comes home. So she has stopped letting herself love anything at all.

Then the autumn storm gives her Fenn — a great, bewildered, gentle giant of a man who makes the water rise when his heart does, and cannot remember that a hundred years ago he was the god who made the sea's oldest promise. He doesn't know what he is. Maren is terrified that she does. Because the sea is waking, sick and grieving, and it wants its god back.

Saltkettle is dying, the bay is turning wrong, and a developer's dredgers are poised to tear open the sea floor and finish what a broken bargain began a century ago. Fenn is the cove's ruin and its only cure — and the sea will drown the whole town to call him home. To save Saltkettle, Maren must send the first person she has let close in years back into the deep that is reaching for him.

Unless she can uncover the truth of a pact every keeper before her read wrong — and learn, at last, how to ask someone to stay.

What the Tide Brought In is a warm, slow-burn cozy fantasy romance brimming with seaside magic, found family, aching longing, and one grumpy octopus who lives in a teapot. Steep the tea, light a lantern, and lose your heart to Saltkettle Cove.

Book One of the Saltkettle Cove novels — a complete standalone with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Perfect for readers of The Spellshop, Legends & Lattes, and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches.