A Second Light

About A Second Light

Autumn empties Honeysuckle Harbor of its tourists and hands the town back to the locals, the tides, and the low October light. Hazel Brennan is happy enough to trade beach crowds for quiet mornings at the Salty Pearl — until the king tide bares the flats and leaves a body at the water's edge. The dead man is a salvage diver the town had already decided to hate, and the whole Harbor is ready to call it a drowning and be done with him.

But Hazel notices the one thing everyone else overlooks: for a man said to have drowned, his diving gear is strangely, impossibly dry. The deeper Hazel digs, the more she suspects the town was wrong about the man they buried — and the more she uncovers about a chapter of Honeysuckle Harbor's history certain old families would much rather kept underwater. Working the candy counter, the docks, and the tide charts alongside Frankie, Mia, Biscuit, and Detective Ben Shaw, she pieces together who could actually have done it, on a night when the obvious suspects couldn't have.

It's a puzzle that turns on the one witness in the Harbor that never lies — the sea itself — and on Hazel's stubborn belief that even a man nobody mourned still deserves the truth.