Between the Tides - Douglas Chapman

Mara Whitaker works the oyster boats before dawn, the same water her mother drowned in twenty-five years ago. When her father dies on the dock, she leaves a six-word voicemail for the sister who left and never came back: Dad's dead. Funeral's Thursday. Come.

Riley returns from Washington with her professional armor and her Italian shoes and the jaw that hasn't unclenched since she was seventeen. The sisters haven't spoken in fifteen years. Now they're trapped together in a failing house with a nor'easter bearing down, sorting their father's life into garbage bags - until they find their mother's hidden journals, a locked box in the attic, and a photograph that changes everything.

Delia Whitaker didn't drown in a boating accident. She was in love with a Black waterman named Elijah Turner. The town knew what happened on that dock. The town said nothing. For twenty-five years, Bayview kept its silence - until a storm stripped the walls down to the studs and two daughters finally heard what the water had been holding.

Between the Tides is a Southern Gothic family thriller about grief, race, inherited silence, and the things the body remembers when the mind refuses to look. Set on Virginia's Eastern Shore, it is a novel where the Chesapeake Bay is as much a character as the sisters who grew up on its edges.

"The Prince of Tides meets Where the Crawdads Sing, with a harder racial conscience and a more body-based prose style."

For readers of Kristin Hannah, Celeste Ng, Delia Owens, and Tana French.