the Coast of Teeth: A Novel Salt Kingdom

The sea drowned the richest fleet on earth. It kept the one thing worth more than the gold. On the night of July 30, 1715, pilot Caleb Rush threads a dying sloop through a hurricane onto the one bar no chart admits is passable - and wakes to find the Spanish plate fleet strewn dead along forty miles of Florida beach. Out of that ruin, a drowning stranger pays him a terrible inheritance: a cipher, a chart in his murdered father's own hand, and half of a ledger two empires will burn the coast to recover. Because the counting book of the 1715 fleet doesn't record silver. It records the skim of twelve years, the names of untouchable men - and a saint's column in which human beings were entered by the piece. Hunted by the crown that pressed him, the merchant who sold him, and Elias Grace - the coldly honest wolf of the Providence, who never lies, keeps every bargain, and prices everything except the one thing that can't be priced - Caleb runs south toward the drowned town of his childhood and the false channel only grief can navigate. With him: Tamsin Reade, a smuggler who reads money the way he reads water, and Kwasi, called Caesar, a freed diver who wants no treasure at all - only the pages that name where his people went. A century and a half later, on the same sand, a lighthouse mason's daughter digs a brass cylinder out of a storm-cut dune on the eve of another war - and inherits the dead pilot's last request: Spend it better than it was got. Rich with the documented history of the 1715 Treasure Fleet, the pirate republic of Nassau, and the darkened Jupiter Inlet light of 1861, THE COAST OF TEETH is a sweeping novel of salt, gold, and reckoning - of hard men and harder bargains, of the women who audited them, and of a ledger the sea refused to let sink. The Salt Kingdom, Book One. A standalone novel. A world you won't want to leave.