The Count Beneath the Tide

Eleven years after fleeing the isolated coastal town of Saltmere, hospice nurse Wren Calloway is forced to return home following her father’s mysterious drowning. In Saltmere, life is dictated by the Tally: an ancient, unearthly bell submerged in the ruins of a drowned church that relentlessly rings a countdown of days. No one speaks a name when it rings. Everyone waits in silence.
When Wren inspects her late father's legacy as the town's Bell Warden, she uncovers a terrifying truth hidden beneath a century of ledgers. The bell is not a prophecy; it is a ledger of unquiet dead, bound by an ancient pact. Worse still, her own name has been written into the final page with a fatal count that is rapidly running out.
Aided by the local constable and a town harboring generational guilt, Wren must venture down into the flooded crypts of Saint Brannoc's to face a century-old bargain. To break the curse, she must risk everything to do the one thing Saltmere has forbidden for 114 years: speak the names of the lost.
The Count Beneath the Tide is a chilling, atmospheric tale of grief, inherited sins, and what a community owes to the dead.