Riveting, disturbing, and impossible to shake.
Melvin delivers a gripping, unsettling thriller about buried crimes, dangerous secrets, and a past that refuses to stay silent. After a devastating Nor’easter, forensic anthropologist Marigold Merry discovers three children’s skulls beneath a pier on Graves Island, each bearing signs of medical experimentation. The discovery draws Nazi hunter Pádraig Cassidy and Indigenous investigator Thomas Cardinal into the investigation. Cardinal suspects the island may conceal a dark, undocumented past. As forensic evidence accumulates and powerful forces move to suppress it, Marigold and her allies must determine what happened on Graves Island—and who is willing to kill to keep its secrets buried.
Melvin’s sequel to Wednesday Night Whites is an ambitious, fast-moving thriller that combines forensic mystery, historical speculation, family drama, and conspiracy. Its opening is immediately arresting: an ordinary winter walk becomes a crime scene, then turns deadly when an armed drone targets Marigold and RCMP Sergeant Jett O’Donnell. From there, the narrative steadily expands, connecting the bones beneath the pier to questions of institutional secrecy, white supremacy, Indigenous trauma, and atrocities whose consequences refuse to remain in the past.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its setting. Melvin makes Graves Island an integral part of the mystery, using its peaceful appearance as a sharp contrast to the disturbing secrets hidden beneath it. Nova Scotia’s frozen shoreline, snow-covered landscape, old structures, and isolation add to the growing sense of unease. As each new discovery reveals another piece of the island’s past, the investigation becomes increasingly personal, connecting the decades-old mystery to people who have lived with its secrets for years.
The large returning cast brings warmth and energy to the darker material. Marigold is intelligent, impatient, stubborn, and believably impulsive, while Pádraig provides experience and moral gravity. Jasmine Merry’s long-held fear gives the mystery an intimate emotional dimension, and Cardinal brings urgency to the search for children whose stories have been erased. Sharp, profane dialogue and flashes of humour provide welcome relief without diminishing the seriousness of the central mystery.
Melvin also keeps the stakes steadily escalating through reversals, threats, competing loyalties, and questions about whom the investigators can trust. Yet beneath the thriller machinery lies a more thoughtful concern with silence and complicity: What responsibility belongs to those who know terrible truths but remain silent, and can exposing the past ever repair what was destroyed? Bold, unsettling, and emotionally charged, the novel turns a macabre discovery into a larger reckoning with memory, accountability, and the enduring cost of suppressed truth. Fans of historical conspiracy thrillers such as Steve Berry’s The Warsaw Protocol and Robert Harris’s Fatherland will be right at home.
***
Her Island Press
Pub date September 29, 2026
ISBN 978-0995012561
978-0995012561
Price $11.96 Paperback
