the Shape at Tide Line

Some things wait fifty years to be found.For fifteen years, the disappearance of a visiting artist has haunted the coastal town of Aldermarsh - the case gone as cold as the water in the unfinished painting she left behind.When Detective Sergeant Mel Kessler reopens the file, she expects a dead end. Instead she finds a name nobody in Aldermarsh has said out loud since 1982: a local girl who vanished at sixteen, and was never found either.Two women. Thirty years apart. No bodies, no suspects, and a town that has spent decades agreeing not to ask why.As Kessler follows a trail of old letters, a locked studio, and a painting that keeps turning up in houses it was never carried into, she starts to understand that Aldermarsh didn't fail to protect these women. It chose not to.Someone here has always known the truth. Kessler is the first person willing to make them say it.Book One of the Mel Kessler Mysteries.