NO BODY AT LOW TIDE
The water has gone out farther than anyone expected.
When Eleri Marsh returns to the coastal town of Porth Carreg after her mother's death, she plans to spend a few quiet weeks clearing the family home and putting the past to rest.
Instead, she finds a question nobody wants asked.
A local fisherman has disappeared. The town believes it knows what happened. The sea took him. The tide will return its answer in its own time.
But Eleri spent a lifetime working with records, evidence and unexplained deaths. When a single inconsistency emerges from the accepted story, she cannot ignore it. What begins with a rope revealed at low tide becomes an unsettling journey through harbor ledgers, chapel accounts, forgotten records and carefully maintained silences.
As she follows the trail, Eleri discovers something far more troubling than a missing man. In Porth Carreg, truth is not hidden by one guilty person. It is protected by an entire community acting out of loyalty, kindness and habit. Every record appears correct. Every explanation sounds reasonable. Every piece fits perfectly.
Except it doesn't.
Set against the haunting beauty of a Welsh harbor where tides reveal and erase in equal measure, No Body at Low Tide is a compelling literary mystery about memory, belonging, evidence, grief and the stories people tell to preserve the worlds they love.
Atmospheric, intelligent and deeply human, William Gomes has created a remarkable novel in which the greatest danger is not what the sea conceals, but what a community chooses to keep hidden.
The sea hid the evidence.
The town hid the truth.
