The Last Winter at Harrow Port
A Novel Told Backward

About this book:

The sea doesn't crash at Harrow Port—it groans. In the deepest freeze of February 1845, Constable Thomas Vance finds the town clerk frozen solid beneath a schooner's hull, a man who knew every debt, every secret, every price a soul might pay to survive the winter. But the body is only the beginning. Told in reverse, *The Last Winter at Harrow Port* unwinds the season like a frozen rope, each chapter stepping further back from the corpse toward the first thaw of spring—through a chimney fire that rained black ash, a missing daughter with a valise packed in lavender water, a captain who'd rather poison his town than pay his dues, and a harbor that holds its breath beneath five feet of ice.

Here, the ledger is law and the cold is a character: it preserves evidence, silences witnesses, and turns neighbors into calculators of survival. As the narrative moves backward through solstice gatherings and autumn harvests, midsummer balls and May tides, the truth doesn't emerge—it submerges. What looks like murder in February reveals itself as mercy in October. What seems like greed in January was desperation in August. And the woman who vanished into the blue haze of the frozen cove? Her footprints were never covered by snow. They were erased by the story that came before.

Atmospheric, intricate, and utterly original, this is historical mystery stripped of artifice—where the structure *is* the investigation, and every revelation is a recontextualization. For readers who love the salt-rusted world of *The North Water*, the narrative daring of *Time's Arrow*, and the slow-burn dread of *The Terror*, *The Last Winter at Harrow Port* delivers a puzzle that doesn't just ask *who killed Jonas Sterling*—it asks what kills a community, one frozen choice at a time.