The Storm's Alibi

The deadliest hurricane in American history is six hours from making landfall. Clara Whitaker has just killed her husband.

Houston, summer 1900. For four years, Clara has quietly run her husband's failing shipping company while he handled the social work and took his weekly trips to Galveston. By August, the ledgers tell her what she has slowly been refusing to see: the trips are to a woman, the company is bleeding, and the man she married was already someone else when he arrived in Texas.

On September 7, she follows him to Galveston. She walks Postoffice Street at dusk and sees him with Rose Delacroix. The next morning she confronts him in his hotel room at the Tremont-and the confrontation does not survive what he tells her about Rose, the company, and the marriage she had thought was hers. By the time the storm makes landfall that afternoon, Charles Whitaker is one body the rising water will not have to claim.

But Rose survives the hurricane. So does a Galveston policeman who finds a wound that does not match storm debris and a whiskey decanter placed too carefully back on a washstand. The investigation goes nowhere-the storm has erased the evidence, and a Galveston businessman named Moody has reasons to keep Mrs. Whitaker's shipping company in working order. Clara walks home a widow to a city that will never know what the storm was actually covering. Until someone she thought she had finished with arrives on her doorstep with a price.

A historical psychological thriller in the tradition of Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River and Kate Quinn's The Diamond Eye, set during the 1900 Galveston Hurricane-the worst single-day natural disaster in American history.

For readers of slow-burn historical thrillers, literary suspense, and Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm. A novel about the silences that catastrophes leave behind, and the women who learn to live inside them.

The storm became his alibi. And hers.