The Oyster Tide

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Twenty years ago she left without a word. Now the oysters are dying, and she's the only one who knows why. On a November night in 2006, Katell Kerguen's father took his boat out to the black rocks at the mouth of the Aber in a storm, and never came home. Six weeks later she left her Breton village for Oregon, without saying goodbye to the boy who had opened an oyster for her on those rocks when she was sixteen. Now she's a shellfish toxicologist, and the oysters on the Aber Kerlann are dying. The village says it's a virus. The mayor says it's a virus. Katell can smell from the top of the hill that it isn't. Erwan Tanguy stayed. He runs his great-grandfather's oyster beds, writes the count in pencil in a green ledger every tide, and has never forgiven her. But he's the only one who can take her out to the rocks. What they find there will close the whole estuary, turn the village against her, and bring a boatyard owner with a beautiful plan for a marina very close to getting everything he wants. Unless a grandmother who has cheated at cards every Thursday for thirty-six years finally plays the card she has been hiding for twenty. The Oyster Tide is a second-chance romance with a real mystery: a Breton fest-noz, a gavotte danced by the little finger, an old man who speaks only in weather forecasts, and a lost boat that was never just a storm. For readers who want: • A second chance that has to face why it was needed • A mystery solved at low tide with a sample bottle • Brittany in storm season: granite, oysters, cider and the sea • A grandmother who is always one card ahead • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A death at sea, twenty years in the past.