The Deep: A Cozy Paranormal Mystery - Thornhaven Mysteries, Book Four: 4

In 1841, six men bought themselves a boat and a night's silence, and rowed out of Thornhaven bay, and not one of them reached the other side.The magistrate heard the evidence and closed the file in three sentences. They had absconded, so they were owed nothing. The boat had foundered, so the sea had done it. The deaths were accidental, and the sea answers to no court. Six names, one boat, one cause of death entered against all six in the same word, in the same hand, on the same day.A finding like that does not hide anything. It simply makes the thing nobody's fault, and then goes on doing the hiding by itself for a hundred and eighty years.Then a survey crew running a routine pass over the floor of the bay picks up something out past the drop, where the seabed shelves away into the dark. It is old. It is lying exactly where it came to rest. And down there in the cold and the black it has barely changed at all.Dr Tess Ashburn is asked to consult on the recovery. She has spent three years building a quiet life on this coast and has lately, to her own considerable surprise, been managing it.She says yes. She always says yes.What comes up off those timbers is not what the inquest recorded, and not what the magistrate thought to ask, and not one word of it would be admitted in any courtroom in the world. Six men went into that water on a black night in 1841. The water did not kill all of them.And on certain mornings there is a man standing on the rocks below the headland, dark-haired, heavy through the shoulders, perfectly still, his face turned out to the bay. Nobody else sees him. When Tess looks up from her work, the rocks are bare.He was there the night the boat went down.He has been waiting a very long time for somebody to ask him about it.The Deep is Book Four of The Thornhaven Mysteries, a completed seven-book paranormal cozy mystery series set on Tasmania's Tasman Peninsula, near Port Arthur.Perfect for readers who love: dual timeline historical mysteries - shipwrecks and cold cases from the deep - Australian convict and colonial history - a forensic anthropologist turned amateur sleuth - a ghost nobody else can see - small-town cozy mystery with no gore and no cliffhangers.Every book solves its own case. Together they build to something almost two hundred years in the making. All seven release through 2026.