The Whitstrand Silence
Yvette Halvarsen came to Whitstrand to sleep. After thirty years interviewing survivors for the International Criminal Court — and one year of being unable to survive her own daughter's death — she bought a dead woman's bookshop on a Yorkshire cliff and asked the village only to let her be.
Then a London developer washes up beneath the abbey wall. The verdict track slides toward accidental. The only police officer who dissents is a young detective sergeant from Leeds who shouldn't be in this village either, and who — politely, patiently — will not say why.
As Yvette is drawn into the case, Whitstrand's warmth begins to sound like a door being closed in her face. Behind that door is the story of a Norwegian merchant sailor who went missing off this coast in 1944. His surname was hers.
Some silences protect the dead. Others bury the living with them.