Litany of Earth

Aphra Marsh comes from Innsmouth and has Deep One ancestry. In 1928 a government raid on the town killed her father, and she was then held for seventeen years in a camp in Oklahoma, where her mother vanished. The book starts after her release.

Aphra now makes her home in San Francisco, sharing it with a Japanese-American family she got to know in the camp. She works in a used bookstore. There an FBI agent, Ron Spector, tracks her down. He needs her knowledge for an investigation into the Aeonists, a group that worships Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones.

The Aeonists follow Oswin Wilder, a wealthy San Franciscan. Aphra soon sees that his cult has no real magic. That does not make it harmless: Wilder is drawing followers in with a false promise of immortality in the sea, and the promise is deadly.

This is the first book in the Innsmouth Legacy series. It retells Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth from the side of the people who were raided and imprisoned, and it treats internment, survival and stolen inheritance as its subjects. Aphra has to decide how far to trust the government that took her family.