The Swell

Kenna Ward gave up surfing three years ago, after her boyfriend drowned. She lost him and the sport in the same stroke, and she has stayed out of the water since.

Then her best friend, Mikki, announces a sudden engagement to a man Kenna has never met. He belongs to a close group of surfers, and Kenna travels to a remote beach in Australia to meet them. Out there, far from any town, the waves, the weather and the tides decide how everyone lives.

The group is dazzling, and the beach they treat as their own is beautiful. Kenna is soon tempted back onto a board. But members of the group begin to go missing, and the paradise shows a darker side.

To protect Mikki and find out who these surfers really are, Kenna has to join them, and she has to do it without becoming one of the people who disappear.

This is a thriller with a fast pace and plenty of twists, set among people whose devotion to the perfect wave turns dangerous. The mood is tense and isolated, with a mystery of vanishing people at its center. It suits a beach read, with the closed circle of suspects familiar from classic murder mysteries and a surf setting that keeps the pressure on.