The Salt Widow Mysteries are a planned five-book series featuring the seaside, superstition, and small-town secrets unraveled by amateur sleuth, Nessa Douglas.

The Salt Widow

A Salt Widow Mystery #1

Truth is a tide. You can’t keep it from coming in.

When Janessa “Nessa” Douglas inherits her grandmother’s house in Mystic Beach on the Chesapeake Bay, she intends to sell it and never look back. The locals still whisper about her grandmother, Elspeth, who wrote strange fairytales about women who kept dangerous secrets.

When a college intern named Ivy Camden vanishes while studying those same folktales, Nessa’s plans are pulled out to sea. Ivy’s research hints that Elspeth’s most infamous story, The Salt Widow, was not born of myth but of murder.

With help from her childhood friend, Nessa begins to unravel the buried history of the town: drowned girls, a power family’s cover-up, and a legacy of silence stretching back more than a century. The deeper she digs, the more she realizes her grandmother’s stories weren’t warnings. They were confessions.

As storms roll in from the bay and old sins rise with the tide, Nessa must decide whether to flee from her family’s darkness or finish what the Salt Widow started.

Coming August 2026!

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