The house between tides

Muirlan House stands on a tidal island in the Outer Hebrides, reachable across the strand only at low tide. When Hetty Deveraux inherits the derelict estate after the death of her last relative, she arrives with plans to restore it and sell it on as a hotel. The renovation stops almost as soon as it starts: beneath a rotting floorboard she finds skeletal remains, and the investigation that follows shows the person died violently.

The novel moves between Hetty's present-day search for answers and the year 1910, when the acclaimed painter Theo Blake brought his young bride Beatrice to the island. Beatrice's isolation deepens, Theo retreats into his work and his silences, and eventually she vanishes from Muirlan altogether.

Working through Theo's increasingly disturbed canvases, the estate's records and the island's own long memory, Hetty pieces together what happened in that marriage and what the community has preferred not to say. Sarah Maine's debut is a dual-timeline story of a house, an island and the secrets the tides keep.