After walking away from a meltdown at a federal cybersecurity lab, linguist-turned-codebreaker Rowan Ivers retreats to Grafton, Illinois, to clear out her late aunt's listing river house. In a warped cedar chest she finds a battered navy ledger, a brass cipher wheel, and Polaroids of the shuttered Peregrine Mill. Each artifact is stamped with a letterpress number; arranged just so, they form a Vigenère key that spells "BLACKWATER ASCENDS." The same phrase appears, faint and blistered, on the town's floodwall near the spot where a high school swimmer vanished two weeks earlier. Rowan goes to Sheriff Leah Bracken, but the mill's benefactor Hallett Pierce has a hand on every door, and the sheriff has too few deputies to push back. At night a dusty rotary phone in the attic rings; the caller never speaks, only taps out a metronome pattern that resolves into coordinates and dates.
Following the code trail, Rowan reconstructs a secret that sloshes between decades: a lockbox dragged from the river in 1989, VHS tapes labeled in a careful librarian's hand, and a hollow silver coin designed to swallow microfilm. The tapes show a midnight rite on the mill's catwalk led by a young street preacher, Aurelius Cane—now a clean-cut congressional candidate with billboards at every intersection. Each solution draws Rowan closer to a shadow strategist known as "Sable," who anticipates her moves and slips clues into the Grafton Courier's daily crossword. With her estranged cousin Mae and a retired towboat captain, Gus Reno, she pieces together how the town turned disaster into doctrine. But Rowan's own history—panic-fogged minutes during the 1993 flood when her brother disappeared—refuses to stay coded. To expose a machine built of debts, faith, and fear before the river crests again, she has to decide which secret to torch and which to publish, and whether the last key was hidden in her aunt's house or in her own fractured memory.
The ledger, the cipher wheel, and the floodwall graffito build an eerie Illinois tableau, and the stakes crest nicely, but recycled clue beats slow the midgame.
Fans of Laura McHugh and Allen Eskens will feel at home in this muddy Midwest hush, where a mill, a churchy past, and a newspaper become conspirators. The book marries small-town noir to nerdy puzzle craft without losing heart.
I'd recommend it to readers who like codes they can track, political rot that feels local, and a heroine whose skill set has edges. Content-wise, expect cult overtones, missing teens, and flood trauma handled with care.
I hoped the code trail would click more cleanly.
Rowan is compelling in her contradictions—fierce about language, brittle about memory, intermittently reckless when the taps hit too close. I believed her competence and her blind spots.
Leah Bracken and Mae spark in dialogue, but remain just outside the light, and "Sable" as a presence fascinates more than satisfies. I liked living with these people; I wanted a little more texture from them than the plot allowed.
Pierced with crossword shivs and rotary-phone coordinates, the structure toggles between 1989 recordings and present-day sleuthing: a two-thread braid that mostly holds tight. The recurring numbers stamped like letterpress on artifacts impress for their precision and rhythm.
A mild sag lands around the extended VHS catalog, where repetition flattens the urgency, but the prose stays sharp, the clue economy fair, and the final sequence tight enough to justify the early patience.
I was floored by how The Cipher in Shadows uses the river as both clock and conscience. The recurring "BLACKWATER ASCENDS" isn't just a key; it's a threat, a prayer, a memory trying to surface.
Rowan's return to Grafton reads like a reckoning. The rotary phone taps, the brass wheel, the floodwall scrawl—all of it twines debt with devotion until you can feel what the town owes and to whom.
What hit hardest is the moral calculus. Publish or burn, protect or indict, trust the sheriff or the cousin or your own unreliable recall. Even the crossword clues feel like pressure points applied by "Sable" to make the community confess.
The book respects trauma while refusing to make it tidy. The VHS tapes and the hollow coin are artifacts with weight, and the structure rises and recedes like a river crest, carrying you into 1989 and back without losing the silt of detail.
By the time the mill and the floodlines converge, I had that rare, electric sense that a thriller can be about harm and hope at the same time. I cheered, I worried, I read the last ten pages twice.
