When Shapes Take Hold - Cascadia Mysteries, #1

For fans of Louise Penny's Three Pines — a literary mystery — atmospheric and character-driven — rooted in place, loyalty, and what it costs to belong. 

Cole Walker came to Hood Canal to build something: a glass and cedar lodge perched above a deep glacial fjord, where giant octopus hunt in the cold depths and orcas pass close enough to hear. He didn't plan to stay. But five summers later, the Lodge has become home — and the people who built it have become his.

When illegal crab traps surface in the tideflats below, what begins as a wildlife violation becomes something far more dangerous. Guests stop coming. Reservations disappear. As a web of wildlife trafficking, bribery, and corruption begins to unravel, someone is using the crisis as a weapon — to destroy the Lodge, the community it has built, and the fragile ecology of the fjord that sustains them all.

Cole is an observer — someone who notices what people don't say, reads the fears that don't fit their stories, and finds the structural flaws in explanations that almost hold together. Nobody appointed him to investigate. But the people who built this place are about to lose everything.

When Shapes Take Hold is the first novel in the Cascadia Mysteries series.. Purchasers of this book will receive a free copy of When Light Takes Hold per the link at the end of the book.