When shipowner Edmund Vane burns to death aboard his yawl in the Cornish harbor of Port Ellery, the town agrees on one word: accident. Insurance investigator Claire Ashworth is sent to close the claim — until she finds every witness a little too tidy. Armed with coastguard logbooks, postal records, a pathological sample, and a ship's bell lying under gray water beyond the bar, she unravels a twenty-year conspiracy among a skipper, a partner, and a coroner's clerk — and beneath it, an older tragedy: the wife who drowned in 1963 saving the man everyone now swears died alone.
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