What the Sea Takes

About this book

On a dying stretch of the Tasmanian coast, girls have been drowning for thirty years, and the town calls them accidents. When a sixteen-year-old is found posed on the reef, Melbourne detective Cal Reardon is sent to rule it one more drowning. A rural-noir thriller.

On a dying stretch of the Tasmanian coast, the girls have been drowning for thirty years. The town calls them accidents. The town is lying.

Bitter Reach has one road in, and the sea takes it back every storm. Six hundred souls cling to a flooded fishing harbour kept alive by a secret that everyone protects and no one will name. When sixteen-year-old Tess Maddox is found posed on the reef they call the Teeth, Melbourne detective Cal Reardon is sent down to rule it one more drowning and go quietly into retirement.

Cal is finished, and he knows it. He destroyed an innocent man a decade ago and lost his marriage and his daughter for it; he believes he ruins everything he touches. But the longer he stays behind the flooded causeway, the clearer it becomes that someone in this town has been keeping the sea’s secrets for a very long time — and that the most trusted man on the coast may be the one with the most to hide.

When the killer takes a young constable who got too close, and then a fourteen-year-old girl, Cal has one night, one boat, and one weapon: the king tide itself, and everything a kind old man once taught him about reading the water. To save the living he will have to race the deadliest slack of the year out to the rock that has swallowed this town’s daughters for a generation — and let the sea decide who it keeps.

A propulsive, atmospheric rural-noir thriller for readers of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer, and Ann Cleeves. WHAT THE SEA TAKES is about complicity and silence, grief turned monstrous, and what a community owes the children it is willing to spend. Set against a coast as lethal and beautiful as anything in Australian crime fiction, it builds to a king-tide climax you will not put down — and an ending that earns every wave.

The tide is turning. Start reading.