She Trawls for Drowned Souls
A Grand Banks Urban Fantasy

About this book:

The salt in St. John’s doesn’t just rust the hinges—it conducts the voices of the drowned. Maeve Sterling has spent twenty-four years hearing the dead whisper through floorboards and chimney drafts, but her brother Thomas’s voice has been silent since the schooner *William Dent* vanished on the Grand Banks. The merchants claim a collision; the priests claim purgatory. Maeve knows better. Armed with a compass that spins toward iron in the blood instead of magnetic north, she signs on as splitter aboard the *Edward Blake*, a salt-bulker crewed by desperate men and captained by a skipper who unloads his catch at midnight in hidden coves.

Skipper Jonas doesn’t fish for cod. He trawls for something far older lurking beneath the cold meridian, where lead lines never strike bottom and nets come up heavy with things that watch without eyes. As the *Blake* pushes into the autumn gales, Maeve finds herself caught between a mate who wants her thrown overboard, a cabin boy who sees the same horrors she does, and a hold filled with green stone ballast that dreams of a submerged hall where the dead pull endless lines. The deeper they sail, the louder the dead become—and Thomas’s watch, frozen at twelve minutes past four, is beginning to warm against her hip.

*She Trawls for Drowned Souls* is a salty, gothic maritime fantasy where Newfoundland folk magic meets cosmic horror. Think *The Terror* meets *The Mercy Seat*: a world where every gull’s cry might be a soul, every fog bank hides a phantom fleet, and the only way to bring a brother home is to haul up whatever the sea has been keeping in the dark. Maeve’s hands are scarred from gutting knives, her ears are full of the abyss, and she’s just signed on for the trawl of a lifetime.