On fog-swept nights along the Providence River, cardiology sonographer Carmen Reyes swears she hears a song threaded through her patients' hearts. It is the same faint phrase of beats—an echo within an echo—appearing in scans from three tenants of a weathered wharf building in Fox Point that is weeks from being gutted and sold. The explanation on paper is artifact. In Carmen's body, where she lives by pulse and pattern, it is a message. When a note folded into an origami boat appears in her locker at Hope Street Cardiology, marked with tide times and the name of a defunct medical device company, she decides to stop being polite about coincidence.
Tamsin O'Rourke—a meticulous municipal archivist with a knack for mapping sound—meets Carmen at a neighborhood workshop on narrative medicine. Tamsin has been cataloging a hush of audio files recovered from the closed Indigo Mill: cassette tapes made by a nurse-poet who vanished after a summer storm, recordings that braid lullabies, foghorns, and whispered numbers. The same numbers surface on Carmen's printouts from a discontinued valve trial, and in chalk hearts that begin appearing on the pavement from Wickenden Street to India Point Park. Every clue pulls them closer to the same dark current: a developer's polished promise of renewal, a clinical study quietly conducted among waterfront tenants with nowhere else to go, and a pattern of failures dismissed as noise.
As hurricane season tightens its fist, Carmen and Tamsin form an unruly alliance of clinic coworkers, archivists, and stubborn longshore neighbors who refuse to vanish from the map. Their slow-burn orbit heats over late-night caldo verde in Carmen's half-packed kitchen, bike rides down the East Bay path, and the careful grammar of consent learned after losses they have not admitted out loud. Meanwhile, someone begins following Tamsin's routes, shredding cardiac tracings, and replacing labels in the archives with blank tape. Carmen's license is on the line; Tamsin's job is suddenly precarious; the tenants at Pier House face a final notice slid under every door at dawn.
During a blackout the night a storm scrapes Narragansett Bay, Carmen and Tamsin cross the city by memory and heartbeat, guided by a string of origami boats left like breadcrumbs, to the red blink of Pomham Rocks Lighthouse. In the keeper's room, they unspool the nurse's last recording and broadcast the names, invoice numbers, and timestamps the city was never meant to hear. The signal ripples across the water and through clinic corridors, cracking open a cover-up and staying an eviction by morning light.
In the aftermath, a co-op rises where the developer's showroom was meant to be. A recall notice lands like a confession. Tamsin curates an exhibit called Undying Echoes Within, where the heartbeat becomes a ledger of care instead of an asset class. Carmen learns that not all artifacts are errors; some are survivals. On the pedestrian bridge at India Point, with the tide turning below and a retired racing greyhound nosing their pockets for treats, they choose each other—slowly, fiercely, with room to breathe. Darkly witty and tender by turns, this coastal romantic suspense unspools a puzzle of class, desire, and the secret languages we carry in the body, asking what it costs to stay, and who gets to call a shoreline home.
Isabella Hyde grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied biomedical engineering and comparative literature at Rice University before working in a cardiology clinical research unit in Houston. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her wife and a retired racing greyhound. Hyde writes contemporary romances that blend slow-burn heat with puzzles, found family, and coastal cityscapes. Her previous novels include Harbor of Ink (2018) and The Midnight Carousel (2021), and she teaches community workshops on narrative medicine and writing the body.
Storm-lit suspense with a tender core: Reyes and O'Rourke follow heartbeat breadcrumbs from clinic to lighthouse while a city decides which lives to erase.
Shelve this for adult readers who like coastal suspense braided with civic records, medical ethics, and a slow-burn queer romance. Best hand-sold to fans of community-forward mysteries and anyone curious about how archives and clinics talk to each other. Content notes for clinical misconduct, stalking, storm-related peril, and on-page medical anxiety; no graphic gore. The romance is tender and thoughtful, with clear consent, and the political thread may spark book club debates about redevelopment and accountability.
The themes arrive loudly and keep arriving. I wanted the questions about care and extraction to resonate; instead they are hammered until the nail bends.
The motif of chalk hearts and numbers has power, but the book circles it so often that it starts to feel like homework. When I am told, again, that the difference between noise and signal is everything, I start craving silence.
There is a quoted refrain of "an echo within an echo" that could have stayed subtle. It returns so many times that the poignancy curdles. The same goes for the title-as-thesis moments that underline "who gets to call a shoreline home" without trusting the reader to connect the dots.
Carmen and Tamsin are compelling on their own, and the coastal corruption thread has real stakes, but the preaching drowns out the pulse. I ended up admiring the intentions while feeling pushed away by the insistence.
I needed fewer slogans, more oxygen. Let the current pull once or twice and the meanings would surface on their own.
The setting works like a weather system. Fog off the Providence River, the tired wharf at Fox Point, chalk marks on wet pavement, and the red blink of Pomham Rocks Lighthouse all conspire to make the stakes feel tidal rather than theatrical. You can smell the brine and paper dust.
What impressed me is how the civic machinery sits beside clinic rooms without clashing. Eviction notices and recall notices feel like matching forms stamped by different hands. The atmosphere grows heavy as hurricane season closes in, yet there's warmth in neighborhood kitchens and in the stubbornness of people who refuse to be scrubbed off a map. The world here isn't backdrop; it's the conflict.
A smart piece of craft that understands sound as structure. The novel splices ultrasound printouts, fragments of cassette transcriptions, and clipped municipal paperwork into a clean rhythmic pattern that keeps the investigation tactile. The early chapters move with a measured pulse, the middle expands in a way that occasionally diffuses tension, and the closing stretch tightens into a satisfying braid where administrative language becomes a kind of weapon. Reyes's clinical perspective anchors the shifts, and the recurring numeric motif is handled with admirable restraint.
This is a romance that listens before it speaks. Carmen reads the world by rhythm and Tamsin organizes it by archive, and the way their skills knit together turns courtship into a method of inquiry. Dialogue lands with gentle precision, consent is treated as craft, and the chemistry hums through small gestures as much as revelations.
I loved how the quieter scenes carry voltage: late soup on a cramped counter, a dog nosing at pockets, a bike coasting past the dark river. Their partnership feels earned, and the tenderness never lets the suspense go slack. By the time they choose each other on the bridge, the choice feels like a new language they made together.
