The Man the Sea Refused

The sea gave him back more than two hundred years ago. Now it has come to collect its debt.

Dr Caroline Keane comes to the remote island of Inniscael looking for distance from the life she has left behind. At forty-three, newly separated and exhausted by years of having her own instincts questioned, she wants only six quiet months working as an anaesthetist in the island hospital.

Then a drowned man is brought into her resuscitation bay.

He has been underwater for nearly an hour. His heart has stopped. Caroline declares him dead.

And then he opens his eyes, takes hold of her wrist and says her name.

Caroline.

Jamie Sutherland should not be alive.

He should not look barely thirty.

And he certainly should not remember a shipwreck that happened in 1816.

For more than two centuries, Jamie has belonged to the sea. Each time death takes him, something returns him to life. But every resurrection carries a terrible price: another piece of his memory disappears.

Caroline soon discovers that Jamie's impossible existence is tied to the wreck of the Mercy Bell, an ancient relic known as the Heart of Cael, and eight other souls whom the sea once refused to keep.

But the most frightening discovery is far more personal.

Jamie knew Caroline long before she knew him.

Forty-three years ago, when she was only an infant, he made a choice that saved her life and bound their fates together.

Now Caroline has returned to Inniscael.

Something inside her has awakened.

And the tide that comes once every nine years is only forty-one days away.

As buried hospital secrets surface and an apparently trusted doctor reveals a history stretching far beyond any ordinary lifetime, Caroline and Jamie are forced to confront the true cost of survival.

Because what lies between them may be love.

It may be fate.

Or it may be something the sea planted inside them long before either had the freedom to choose.

Atmospheric, haunting and deeply romantic, The Man the Sea Refused is a gothic paranormal romance about memory, mortality, second chances and the terrifying beauty of finally choosing your own life.