A Sisu Bay Novel
Paranormal romance on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where the paper says one thing and the ground says another.
Book one
Expected December 2026
Winter Claim is being written now and is expected in December 2026. If that moves, the newsletter hears before anywhere else does — and it hears the same week, not afterwards.
A Vampire Romance · Sisu Bay, Book One
Maren Vance came north with a job that was supposed to take six weeks.
Sisu Bay is two thousand people, one store, and twenty feet of snow a year. The houses along that shore sit far enough apart that nobody hears anything, and close enough that everybody knows. They are kind to her. They tell her nothing. Every question she asks gets answered at somebody else's supper table before it gets answered at hers.
Somebody starts parking a truck at the end of her road at night.
Somebody else plows it at half past three in the morning and is gone before she reaches the window.
Nick Scalise is fifty, or looks it. He has been buying poor ground up here since the fifties, and what he owns is not the ground — it is everything underneath it. The copper. And one hill that four men agreed never to talk about.
He helped raise the walls of the house she sleeps in. He has never once been up the steps.
Every Sisu Bay novel is one couple, start to finish, with a happy ending. No cliffhangers on the romance.
Where to start
One couple per book, start to finish, with a happy ending every time. Read them in order if you like the county to add up — but each one is a whole story, and nobody is left mid-romance at the end of a volume.
He plows her road at three in the morning.He has never come up the steps.
Maren Vance came north with a job that was supposed to take six weeks. Somebody starts parking a truck at the end of her road at night, and somebody else plows it at half past three in the morning and is gone before she reaches the window. She has permission to be in that house. She does not have a right to it.
Expected December 2026
Read the full descriptionThe beach is not sand.Nothing grows on it, and nobody minds.
Rosalind Keele is an environmental engineer, hired to put a number on two miles of poisoned shore. The Trevarrow family has lived on top of it since 1897, and has been remarkably relaxed about a stranger arriving with a coring rig — which is the first thing that bothers her. What she is standing on is not waste rock.
To come
Read the full descriptionThirty-one of them, in 1911.There are eleven now.
Adele Moreau is a forensic genealogist, and the chain of records she was sent north to close does not close. Ten names recur across a hundred and sixty years of instruments in this county, in different hands, never all at once. Emil Karhu is the eleventh, and he is the one who has been keeping the count.
To come
Read the full descriptionNobody has ever assembled the whole chain.She just finished it.
Ines Baptiste came north to close a title company, not run one. What the outgoing abstractor left behind is the only place this county's whole chain of title has ever been assembled in one draw — because the courthouse indexes by name, not by parcel, and nobody before her had reason to do the work. One signature turns up in every decade of it, and the man who came to ask her not to publish made the mistake of telling her why.
To come
Read the full descriptionSunlight doesn't burn him.It just makes him easy to find.
Vivian Rautio runs the passenger ferry out to the light, and she has never once needed a deckhand who works nights. Teodoro Ferraro is the best she has ever had, and he is only available after eight in the evening. In June the sun does not go down until eleven, and somebody has worked out that the easiest way to find him is to watch for who is not standing in it.
To come
Read the full descriptionShe has an answer for every column in her book.She has never had one for this.
Cetta has been buying this county for a hundred and forty years and is four hundred acres from finished. Those acres belong to Aino Vuorio, who has refused to sell for thirty years and knows exactly what is under her ground. Domenico is the last of the eleven still standing, and he has come to try the one thing none of them ever has.
To come
Read the full descriptionThe Sisu Bay record
The county records a name the federal government has never printed. That is the first strange thing about Sisu Bay, and it is a paperwork problem before it is anything else.
Not on the quad sheet
Sisu Bay is a name the county uses in every instrument it records and the federal government has never once printed. It is not on the quadrangle. It is not in the gazetteer. The Postal Service calls the place Eagle Harbor.
Grey-black, forty feet deep in places
A stamp mill put thirty years of crushed rock into the water and the lake handed most of it back. What is on that shore is mill tailings — sharp, grey-black, and nothing grows in it.
Three stories, no verdict
There is a boat that went into the ice while men stood on the shore all night with lanterns so it would have something to steer at.
Below the ordinary high-water mark
Land descriptions stop at the ordinary high-water mark, the way descriptions do. Past that line the ground belongs to the State and is held for everybody.
Join my newsletter
Not a free book. A document out of the Sisu Bay record — a parish register, a mining charter, the carbon of a purchase offer — and the research underneath the novels, most of which never reaches the page. None of it appears in any of the books. It is written for the list.