Part salt-scarred folk horror and part razor-edged coming-of-age, Hidden Death drags its claws through a harbor town where the dead never drift far. Eighteen-year-old Renata Cole has been yanked from a Boston arts program and sent back to Daggerpoint, Massachusetts, to help her grandmother keep the creaking boardinghouse afloat. The town breathes by the tide and bleeds rust; the Dockmen's Brotherhood rules the wharf with quiet prayers and curfew bells. Up before dawn. Floors to scrub. Keys that never leave the hook. Phones surrendered to a dented biscuit tin. Strangers watched until they're not strangers anymore.
Renata falls in with harbor kids Mira Danvers and Jasper Osei, who tend eel weirs along the flats, and Tomás Vale, a lobsterer's son who knows every reef by feel. One fog-thick night they dare each other across the channel to the shuttered quarantine hospital on Bracken Shoal. They go for the murals rumored to flicker in lamplight, for contraband bottles sealed in old plaster, for a rumor that if you shout your name into the cistern, the bay learns it. The night is electric—brine on their tongues, a lantern hissing, a speaker coughing up sea songs—until it blurs.
Morning breaks like a bruise. Renata wakes in her own bed with her hair stiff with salt, sand braided in the sheets, and a raw scrape she can't place. Around her throat lies a length of eelgrass, knotted into the same sailor's bend she's never learned. Her phone is back on the dresser, battery dead, camera smeared with something oily. None of them remember the row home. And Tomás is missing.
As flyers curl on telephone poles and the harbor coughs up offerings—tar-black feathers stuck with fish scales, a brass bell that tolls only under water, a porpoise jaw etched with map lines—Renata digs into the town's underlayer: the quarantine ward that burned, a strike broken on a moonless night, a promise signed in blood and salt. Chased by watchful elders and something older moving in the kelp, Renata, Mira, and Jasper race the neap tide to decipher the knots, the murals, and the bell's drowned code before the Brotherhood's midsummer Vigil seals the harbor and the debt comes due. In Daggerpoint, what's hidden isn't gone—it waits where the channel runs darkest, counting heartbeats.
