The Off-Season Tribunal
A One-Day Courtroom Drama

About this book:

The Atlantic is rising, the causeway is drowning, and the only courtroom left standing is a shuttered Gilded Age hotel on a vanishing barrier island. In *The Off-Season Tribunal*, a single-day hearing becomes a siege: Teresa Vance, a maritime lawyer with salt in her bones, faces off against Julian Vane, corporate counsel in cashmere oxfords, before a judge who refuses to adjourn for weather, water, or the bay seeping through the ballroom floorboards. The evidence isn't in briefs—it's in core samples of dead marsh grass, a 1741 charter promising "quiet enjoyment of the banks," and the islanders themselves, watching the surf climb the seawall while attorneys argue sovereign immunity.

As the tide turns the courtroom into a tidal pool, procedure collides with survival. The defense objects to the venue's "prejudicial damp"; the plaintiffs measure their vanishing land in inches. Witnesses testify from a seawall that may not exist by afternoon. The stenographer records the wind. And somewhere in the damp grandeur of the Hotel Breakers, a seventy-million-dollar question hangs in the salt air: when the coastline itself is the client, who answers for its loss?

Taut, atmospheric, and urgently timed, this is courtroom drama stripped to its pilings—where law meets rising water, and the verdict arrives with the midnight surf.