When the River Freezes

A body in the ice. A secret in a red coat. A river that remembers.

Maura Vale came home to Milan, New Hampshire for quiet, distance, and the kind of winter that makes old ghosts easier to ignore.

Then a body surfaces in the frozen Androscoggin, and a dying man brings an eighteen-year-old secret to her barn.

Sadie Bell was supposed to be just another troubled girl who ran. Maura never believed that story. It nearly destroyed her reputation once, and now the past is back with blood on its hands.

With a blood-marked pendant on her porch and Deputy Elias Thorne asking questions she does not want to answer, Maura is forced back into the cold case that nearly ruined her. Elias is determined to keep her safe, but as they follow a trail of frozen roads, motel rooms, and buried evidence, the line between danger and desire gets harder to hold.

But Room 12 heard everything.

The river remembers more than it should.

And Maura Vale is done letting men decide which women get believed.

When the River Freezes is Book One in Androscoggin After Dark, a North Country romantic suspense novella series featuring small-town secrets, cold cases, and slow-burn heat.