The Constable of Salt Road

About this book:

On the knife-edge island of Osea Ness, where a single gravel spine divides sea from marsh, Constable Thomas Clout has spent six years policing a place the mainland forgot. Then comes an October morning when the tide goes out and the bodies don't come back. A wealthy farmer's hat in the samphire. A schoolmistress's patten on the road. The parson's spectacles on a milestone, his collar in the mud beneath a bridge—and in a hidden ledger, three names marked *account closed*, with Clout's own initials written for next Tuesday.

The Salt Road offers no hiding places, no side turns, no escape. Only nine miles of flint and fog between the ferry and the church, with the water rising on both sides. Something is harvesting the island's souls in plain sight, leaving clues like offerings: a lantern burning on a milestone, a prayer book rewrote in red ink, the smell of rendered fat where no fire should burn. Clout is a man of system—ledgers, measurements, the weight of things—but the marsh operates by older rules, and the list of the dead is growing toward him with the tide.

Atmospheric, relentless, and steeped in the salt-black lore of the Essex coast, *The Constable of Salt Road* is a Victorian gothic mystery where the landscape itself is the chief suspect. For readers who love the creeping dread of *The Essex Serpent* and the procedural grit of *The Yard*, this is a locked-room puzzle spread across a drowning island—where the only way out is forward, and the water keeps the time.