What the Storm Swallows
A Coastal Salvage Thriller

About this book:

The Gulf doesn't give up its dead for free—and it sure as hell doesn't give up Spanish silver. Gage Sullivan knows every current, every shoal, and every rusted wreck off the Mississippi coast, but his forty-two-foot salvage boat *Restless* is held together by prayer and duct tape. When a Category 5 hurricane bears down on the barrier islands, the window to find the *Santa Rosa*—a 1794 galleon carrying three hundred boxes of Havana treasury silver—shrinks to hours. Nolan Vance knows the coordinates too. He has a hundred-eighty-foot industrial support vessel, a fleet of ROVs, and enough lawyers to bury any rival claim in admiralty court. He also has Perry Finch, the oldest diver in the Gulf, feeding him intelligence. But Finch just slipped Gage a three-fingered signal: *thirty feet, bearing three-zero-zero*. Now Gage has a towfish in the water, a storm building behind him, and a black-hulled shadow ship cutting his sonar cable with a hydraulic claw.

The race isn't just against Vance's deep pockets or Mateo's hundred-mile-an-hour winds. It's against the Gulf itself, which swallows wrecks whole and spits out nothing but ballast stones and bones. Gage and his deaf, one-eared partner T-Bone have six hours before the shelf turns into a washing machine. They have a single iron nine-pounder cannon marking a debris field that shouldn't exist. And they have a price on their heads—because Vance doesn't file injunctions when he can cut brake lines, jam winches, and let the storm do the wet work.

From the Biloxi marshes to the crushing dark of the continental shelf, *What the Storm Swallows* is a visceral, salt-crusted thriller where every fathom of line paid out could be the last. The barometer is falling. The silver is waiting. And the only law that matters out here is the one written in rust, pressure, and blood.