Cliona Hart-Vale

When Róisín Murphy inherits her estranged mother's crumbling Victorian estate on the cliffs of coastal Ireland, she expects paperwork. She gets something far worse: thirty years of obsessive documentation—journals, photographs, audio recordings, architectural drawings—all tracking something her mother called the Salt.

Something alive inside the walls.

The locals cross themselves when they see her. Róisín tells herself grief makes people strange. Then her tears begin crystallizing.

As she unravels her mother's nested archive, she uncovers a family curse stretching back to the famine—a great-great-grandfather's unspeakable act of grief, the ancient thing he accidentally imprisoned, and the women of her bloodline who have been feeding it ever since. Not as keepers. As mechanisms.

Now the Salt is almost ready to breach. And Róisín carries the genetic key.

She can run. Her mother tried that too.

Fans of Mexican Gothic, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Luminous Dead will find something that lingers long after the last page.