The House on the Sound
$5.99 · eBook · instant download
“At the bottom of the world, distance is not the same as safety.”
On a deep, cold sound in the far south of New Zealand, a grey man has kept his mother's record for thirty-one years — a record of the sister who went to a beloved school and never came home. DI Maya Anders travels to the end of the map, and Honor Whitling makes one last journey to stand at the edge of a case she can no longer run. The sound keeps its dead a long time in the cold.
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What you are getting
How it begins
‘At the bottom of the world you learn that distance is not the same as safety. It only feels that way to the people who sent you here.’ — Ailsa Rennie, in a notebook, 1985
The southerly came up the sound a little after nine, and Ailsa Rennie heard it before she felt it, the way you always did at the head of Kaimata — a change in the register of the water first, the slap of it against the jetty piles going hard and irregular, and then the bush on the far wall beginning to move all together, fifteen miles of it, like a dark animal turning over in its sleep. She stood at the open door with the lamp behind her and let the first of the wind reach her face. It had come off the ice. You could always tell. There was a mineral edge to it, a cleanness that was not kind, and between her door and the place that wind was born there was nothing at all — no town, no ship lane, no other lit window — only three thousand miles of black water and then the white shelf of the pole itself.
Is this your kind of book?
The House on the Sound is gothic coastal crime — six coastlines, six houses, and one long record of what a family was willing to bury. It is written for readers who want the patient kind of crime and suspense: plotted, unhurried, and more interested in what people conceal than in how loudly it ends.
This is Book Five of Tide House Mysteries. Each book closes its own case, so it can be read on its own — but the series is built to be read in order, and starting at The House at Winterkeep means the connections land the way they were written.
The Tide House Mysteries in order
- The House at Winterkeepfree
- The House Below the Tide$5.99
- The House at Elder Carr$5.99
- The House on the Salt$5.99
- The House on the Sound$5.99 · you are here
- The House on the Lough$5.99
Why buy it here
Buying from this page gets you both formats in one purchase — the EPUB for your e-reader or phone, and the PDF for everything else. There is no DRM on either file, so the book is genuinely yours: move it between devices, keep a backup, read it in ten years on something that has not been invented yet.
The download link arrives the moment the payment clears, and it is tied to the email you paid with — so if you lose the file, the link can be re-issued to that same address. And buying direct means the money goes to the person who wrote the book rather than a retailer’s cut.
