Silted Secrets (Circle of Tides — Book 4)

Buried thirty feet beneath the anaerobic mud of Midnight Pass lies a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado, three thousand pounds of industrial ballast, and a twelve-year conspiracy engineered to choke an entire bay.

October 1995. The reopening of the historical Midnight Pass inlet by the commercial cutter-suction dredge Suncoast Titan was supposed to be a routine coastal engineering milestone. Instead, the dredge's rotating tungsten teeth jam against solid Detroit steel thirty feet beneath the channel floor: a crushed 1974 Cadillac Eldorado sealed inside an airless tomb of marine clay. Pinned to the driver's seat is a saponified corpse impaled by a drop-forged Ringling circus tent stake—and sealed inside the welded trunk is a second body: the nineteen-year-old apprentice mechanic who rigged the car to sink.

Called to the county impound yard before a federal task force can seize the wreckage, marine forensic surveyor Ray Spooner reads the physical geometry of the steel. The Cadillac's leaf-spring suspension is permanently flattened by three thousand pounds of industrial ballast, its severed brake line is packed with rendered Ringling animal tallow, and its VIN brackets bear the unmistakable 100-ton cold-press shear signature of the historic Venice circus yards.

The Cadillac was no accident. It was Silt Anchor SA-01—the primary keystone in a six-car subsea array deployed in 1983 by billionaire state senator Elias Whitaker and master salvage ghost Leo McAniff to trigger a catastrophic sedimentation cascade, manipulate barrier-island coastal valuations, and conceal an offshore VLF acoustic telemetry network.

Working alongside his daughter Maya, Artie Whittaker, and Lloyd's adjuster Beverly Burns, Ray follows a trail of hidden microcassettes, Venice train-yard ambushes, and a tropical storm standoff aboard the sinking dredge barge—where the only way to break the syndicate is to turn its own acoustic physics against it.

*Rich with authentic 1990s maritime forensics, coastal hydrology, and relentless Suncoast noir suspense, SILTED SECRETS is the fourth installment in the acclaimed Circle of Tides mystery series.*

Instant Digital Delivery Package - **DRM-Free EPUB Edition (`AHS-BOOK-COT-04.epub`)**: Compatible with Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo, and all standard e-readers. - **Typeset 6×9 Print-Edition PDF (`AHS-BOOK-COT-04-print.pdf`)**: Full 519-page collector's interior layout (185,386 words, 32 chapters). - **Forensic Case File & Reader Dossier (`AHS-BOOK-COT-04-dossier.md`)**: Series chronology, 1995 Suncoast setting coordinates, and technical forensic notes.