A taut new novel of coastal suspense about a woman welcomed into a glittering Rhode Island dynasty and a cliffside house designed to keep things in, not out. Mara Quinn, an EMT who has spent years outrunning a chaotic childhood in Worcester, thinks she has finally found steady ground when Adrian Bellamy—heir to Bellamy Confections, the chocolate empire with stores from Back Bay to Fifth Avenue—falls for her after a late-night rescue on Route 138. He marries her, carries her across the threshold of Garnet Hall on Newport's Ocean Drive, and promises the quiet she has earned.
But quiet has rules at Garnet Hall, rules etched into a silver card case the housekeeper presses into her hand on the first night: Keep the shutters latched at dusk. Do not use the sea stairs when the tide is out. Never answer the crimson phone. And do not, under any circumstances, unseal the ledger bound in green calfskin in the Long Gallery. These aren't eccentricities; they're survival. The boathouse holds gouge marks like clawed stone. The orangerie smells of bleach and salt. In a wooden crate, Mara finds dozens of handblown glass hearts—each one spiderwebbed with cracks as if broken by the same sudden heat.
Mara has weathered worse storms than marble corridors and old-money sneers. But the Bellamys are burying more than scandal. Five years earlier, on a rain-slick night on Thames Street, an investigative blogger died in a hit-and-run, and Mara's signature sits at the bottom of the first EMT report. The family has been waiting for her longer than she has known Adrian's name. The cruelest secret is not what the Bellamys did—it's why Adrian chose her. He needs her to make something disappear. Mara won't. She came here to start over. She plans to leave with the truth.
Can Mara survive what she uncovers when the tide turns under Garnet Hall? Release day is December 9th! (Included in Kindle Unlimited!)
Quick take for suspense fans weighing this one.
This is a suspense tale about containment and confession, about what dynasties lock away and what tides return to shore. The rule "Never answer the crimson phone" becomes a statement on inherited secrecy and the price of silence, while the spiderwebbed glass hearts echo generational stress fractures that finally give.
The ocean keeps score.
Give me a coastal mansion with rules and I am in, but Garnet Hall's internal logic wobbles.
Shutters, sea stairs, a crimson phone, a sealed ledger: great ingredients. The story rarely grounds these constraints in the family's past beyond ominous gestures.
The gouged boathouse and the bleach-sour orangerie are eerie, then the book repeats them until they lose bite.
Those cracked glass hearts beg for symbolic follow-through; instead, they mostly decorate the dread.
I wanted the house to operate like a system with consequences. Too often it reads like props arranged for effect.
I went in ready to care about Mara, but her choices around Adrian feel incoherent from scene to scene.
The roadside rescue romance is framed as destiny, yet the book tells rather than shows why she falls; their conversations skim surfaces.
When the Bellamys' long game comes into focus, the emotional fallout is strangely muted. I wanted rage, clarity, something that burns.
Instead, we circle through reassurances and a passive drift through marble halls while the housekeeper's rules do the heavy lifting. I was frustrated, loudly.
By the time the green ledger and the crimson phone carry weight, I no longer trusted the people holding them. Thrillers run on character, and here that engine sputters.
The prose favors crisp, briny description and clipped transitions; the structure toggles between present-tense discovery in the house and slivered reflections from Worcester and Route 138.
A few chapters rehash the rule list one time too many, and the climax stacks reveals rather than letting them breathe. Still, the EMT details anchor the chaos with lived-in texture.
The rules at Garnet Hall turn from quirks to threats with smart, propulsive pacing. One reveal lands a beat late, but the coastal menace and dominoing secrets kept me hooked.
