The Storm Reaper

Fire Island, hurricane season: a claustrophobic, slow-burn crime thriller about the only police officer who believes a serial killer is using the storms for cover.

Kill during the storm. Let the tide take the body out to sea. The police rule every disappearance a storm-related death. It worked until the currents shifted and the bodies started washing back.

When Violet Crisp was sixteen, she survived the storm that killed her best friend. The same night, she saw a man murdered in the fog. The chief said she was confused by grief. Her own father said she was making it up. She spent the next ten years building a case nobody wanted.

She's twenty-six now, a police officer on the island she's never left, living on her boat with her cat, Purrmaid, and a corkboard full of dead people. A new chief is finally listening. Another storm is coming. Another body has washed up. And Violet is starting to understand that The Storm Reaper is someone local, someone she may know.

Perfect for readers of Lucy Foley, Riley Sager, Tana French and Ruth Ware, and for anyone who loved the tides-and-birds naturalism of Where the Crawdads Sing.

A slow-burn Fire Island crime thriller built on real American folklore
The Storm Reaper is Book One of the Violet Crisp series, an atmospheric crime thriller and police procedural set on a barrier island off the south shore of Long Island during hurricane season, told in the wry first-person voice of the woman everyone wrote off. It is built on the Gray Man, a real-life Atlantic-coast ghost folklore about a figure who appears before hurricanes to warn people to leave.

What readers are saying:

"A tense, atmospheric thriller that blends island folklore with the dread of being trapped during a hurricane while a serial killer hides in plain sight." - Sarah, Goodreads Reviewer (5 stars)

"This story sucks you in and holds you hostage until the last word. I couldn't stop reading. Unputdownable!" - Beverly, Goodreads Reviewer (5 stars)

"Absolutely gripping plot that I couldn't put down, great characters and twists I didn't see coming. A must read." - Melinda Smith, Goodreads Reviewer (5 stars)

Perfect for readers who devour:

• Atmospheric thrillers where the setting is a living, breathing force
• Female detectives nobody believes, who turn out to be right
• Hurricane-season suspense and closed-circle island mysteries
• Slow-burn crime fiction with real police procedural and forensic detail
• Cold cases in small towns where everyone knows everyone
• American folklore worked into a modern investigation

Why readers loved it:

• Twists readers "didn't see coming," concealed until the last chapter
• A flawed protagonist whose voice readers call "raw, honest, and deep"
• Fire Island rendered as "a living, breathing force"
• A narrator who reads tides, currents and birds the way other detectives read case files
• Book One of an ongoing series (a new release every spring, just in time for your summer reading list)

From Kristen Van Nest, author of Perfect Modern Wife (currently being adapted for film) and the comedic memoir Where to Nest. She is a viral comedian who took her wit dark. She spent every childhood summer on Fire Island, getting sunburnt, chasing minnows, and nearly drowning that one time.