- Genre
- Detective thriller
- Published
- 2026
- Pages
- 448
- Format
- Signed paperback
2026 · Detective thriller
Her Second Funeral
Some tides return what they take.
When a fisherman's body washes ashore wearing her missing sister's ring, Detective Iris Kell must face the village that buried the truth twenty years ago.
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Synopsis
Detective Iris Kell left the coastal village of Skerry Hollow at nineteen and swore she would never go back. Then a trawler drags in a body that has been under the water for a week — with her sister's ring on its hand, and her sister has been missing for twenty years.
The tide list says the body could only have entered the water in the drowned hour, a narrow window between two tides that happens twice a day. Iris follows that window backwards, and it leads through a locked boathouse, a priest who keeps the parish ledgers sealed, and a summer night in 2006 that five people have spent two decades pretending never happened.
The deeper Iris dredges, the more she suspects that the village did not just bury a truth — it buried the wrong person, and the sea has finally decided to give it back.
An excerpt
"The drowned hour began at 4:12 and ended at 4:41. Twenty-nine minutes in which Skerry Hollow had no shore, no streetlights, and no witnesses willing to say they were awake. The water knew the schedule better than anyone. It had been keeping it for twenty years."
— Her Second Funeral, chapter one
What readers say
"A tidal wave of a thriller — Vance writes fog, salt and guilt better than anyone working today."
The Northern Review
"The best detective fiction I have read this decade. Iris Kell is a keeper."
Crime & Ink
