The Long Tide

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REVISED 7/8/26

Synopsis

Four people — Hamilton, Wilson, Mary, and Clara — buy a house together at Allen Point, where the road ends at a bluff above the salt marsh and the marsh opens to the sound. They have come for a quieter life. The Cape has other plans. Four months in, a body comes out of the water: Ray Fitch, a man who knew these channels better than anyone alive, found where a man who knew the channels should never be. The locals call it an accident of tide and age. Hamilton calls it a question. As the investigation works its way through dock logs, boatyards, and the slow economy of a working waterfront, it becomes clear that the marsh keeps records of its own — and that someone has been counting on the tide to erase them. The Long Tide is the first Cape Cod novel.

Eight years ago, the outer Cape decided it knew how Thomas Voss died. A jury agreed. Daniel Corrigan went to prison for the drowning of his own crewman — and came home to a town that would rather he hadn’t.

Now an old lobsterman who knew what really happened that night off Monomoy has been found drowned in the marsh below Allen Point, and Henry Hamilton — newly arrived on the Cape with the three people he works beside — can see the accident for the killing it is.

To answer one death, he has to reopen another. To reopen the wreck, he has to face a community that closed ranks once and will do it again.

The tide reveals what the tide reveals. The record holds what the record holds

Atmospheric, intelligent, and profoundly human, The Long Tide is a coastal mystery of memory, testimony, and moral consequence. The ninth volume of The Adventures of Henry Hamilton, it brings the series into a richer, more spacious register—where the sea keeps its own records, old truths return with the tide, and the hardest thing is not discovering what happened, but learning how long people have been carrying it. 

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