Sisu Bay · Book Three
Not yet written
This is the shape of the book, published early because the series is planned all the way through. It has no date, and it will not get one until it is finished.
Hear when it is writtenOld Blood
A Vampire Romance
Thirty-one of them, in 1911.There are eleven now.
The middle of the series, and the one that names the stakes.
Adele Moreau finds people who do not want to be found, and she does it out of paper.
She is a forensic genealogist. Give her a name and a county and she will hand you back a chain of records so tight it stands up in probate — which is why an estate lawyer downstate has sent her to Sisu Bay with one instruction: establish who is actually entitled to inherit a house nobody has lived in since 1974.
The chain does not close. Ten names recur across a hundred and sixty years of instruments in this county, in different combinations, in different hands, never all at once. They are witnesses. They are grantors. They are the second signature on a deed nobody remembers recording. Individually every one of them is unremarkable. Laid side by side they are a pattern, and Adele has spent twenty years being the person who sees the pattern.
Emil Karhu is the eleventh, and he is the one who has been keeping the count.
He is a mill hand's grandson with a Finnish surname and a woodlot, and he has been quietly writing down where the other ten are for longer than the state has existed in its current shape — not out of loyalty. Out of arithmetic. There were thirty-one of them in 1911. There are eleven now, and the number has only ever moved one direction, and the woman buying this county one parcel at a time has been working from the same list.
He would very much like Adele to stop.
He would very much like Adele to stay.
He is going to have to pick one, and the register in her hands is going to pick it for him.
What you are getting
- Standalone with a full happy ending
- Two people who research for a living
- Only one bed, and it is February
- A hero who has been alone a very long time
- The series' stakes, stated out loud for the first time
Every Sisu Bay novel is one couple, start to finish, with a happy ending. No cliffhangers on the romance.
The rest of them
Book One
Winter Claim
A title examiner comes north for six weeks and finds her own address in the chain she is running.
Book Two
Poor Rock
What the mills threw away, and the family that has been living on top of it since 1897.
Book Four
Long Chain
A hundred and sixty years of conveyances, and the name that appears in all of them.
Book Five
Deep Summer
Nineteen hours of daylight, and nowhere in the county to be.
Book Six
Free and Clear
The last parcel, and what it costs to own a thing outright.
In the meantime
There is no sample chapter on this site
That is deliberate. What there is instead is the record — the place, the law it runs on, and the research underneath the books, written for the list and appearing in none of the novels. It is the part most authors throw away.
Read the Sisu Bay record