No witnesses. No skid marks. No second car.
Seventeen-year-old Wren Calloway has spent her whole life on a houseboat in a fog-bound Oregon town, on the wrong side of a locked door.
Then a truck with no headlights forces her mother off a cliff road. Wren swims up out of the black water. Her mother doesn’t. The sheriff calls it an accident.
But behind the door, Wren finds what her mother died for: goggles that make the air visible. Through them, the fog isn’t weather at all. It’s pouring off an island two miles out to sea, against the wind, every night.
Someone is making it. Someone killed to hide it. And the only adult she has left works for the people who did it.
To prove it, she’ll have to make a whole town see what only she can.
For readers who loved A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and One of Us Is Lying.
You can photograph air. That part is real.
Schlieren imaging was first developed in the 1860s. It makes differences in the density of air visible, so you can see heat rising off a hand, a shock wave leaving a bullet or the plume of a cough. Engineers use it to study jet engines. Researchers used it to film coughs during the pandemic.
In Follow the Air, Wren’s mother took it further than anyone else had.
Veil, Calder Atmospherics, Harrow Point and everyone who lives there are invented. The physics isn’t.
Book Two is on its way.
The Breath Between continues The Harrow Point Files. Leave your email and you’ll be the first to hear when it’s ready, with the odd extra from Harrow Point in between.
About Sloane Merriday
Sloane Merriday writes mysteries for readers who notice things. She started Follow the Air at nine years old on an old Windows 95 computer, and finished it many years later.
She lives by the sea, where fog is just weather. Mostly.
Review copies, interviews and everything else: hello@sloanemerriday.com