Theirs is a reunion . . . to die for! Four friends are meeting at a beautiful Cape Cod beach house for a long overdue reunion. But before the trip is over, one of them will wind up dead . . . Perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Lucy Foley.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lie In The Tide by Holly Danvers, which is out June 3rd 2025.
It’s been twenty years since Mori, Avery, Remi and Calista last saw each other. As they reconnect on Cape Cod to celebrate Calista’s fortieth birthday, each one hides a painful and devastating secret.
Former introvert Mori is now a bestselling erotica author. She’s more successful than she ever dreamed, and yet shamefully on the cusp of divorce number three.
Remi’s a yoga instructor, blissfully married to her high school sweetheart. On this trip, she’s concealing her pregnancy – and the baby’s paternity.
Quiet Avery is a farm wife living in Iowa. Her life doesn’t have the scandals of her friends’. But she does have a house full of kids she fears she’ll never see again . . .
And Calista, the quintessential suburban mom and high school English teacher, is harboring the biggest secret of all.
These four women are about to learn that one little white lie could kill more than just their friendship . . .
Lie in the Tide is an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller that digs deep into those little white lies that have the potential to turn deadly.
They found her motionless. Her nose smothered in the sand. Her right eye was as vacant as frosted sea glass. Her skin translucent; akin to a jellyfish. The surf had tangled her hair like a mass of unwanted kelp in which the ocean had rudely regurgitated. Despite the sun burning overhead, she was frozen to the touch, her lips as dark as the Atlantic. The waves crashed atop her lifeless body as if she were an abandoned piece of driftwood, smacking her with each additional roll of the tide.
A guttural screech erupted from one of them.
There was no mistaking it.
A friend was dead.
–Excerpt from KILLER BEACH written by bestselling author Mori Hart
Calista
Calista Moore studied the reflection in the mirror staring back at her. Her features remained the same, but everything inside of Calista was different. She was acutely aware that nothing of her life would continue as it was.
Not the brick house, which for the last eighteen years had been the gathering place for family, friends, teenagers, and alike. You know the one—everybody knows it. The rambling ranch tucked into the wooded lot with the meticulous lawn lined in deep blue hydrangea. The one where the flowers follow the slate path all the way to the front door, come summer. The garden which Calista had designed and planted with her own two hands. Kirk hadn’t helped that day. Somehow, he fails to remember that important detail when visitors wow and ogle the blooming display. And her husband certainly doesn’t remember how much convincing he needed at the greenhouse to purchase them. Instead, what resulted was a downright argument amid the hanging baskets of blood red begonia and blue lobelia, when she’d stood her ground. Funny how life was like that. Arguing over things that didn’t matter. In Calista’s opinion, deeper rooted issues caused senseless arguments to erupt between them at a moment’s notice. It had only been the tip of the iceberg.
Her house.
The popular one.
The one in which they’d hosted neighborhood potlucks, too numerous to count.
Calista’s home.
The refuge she’d meticulously refurbished with a monochromatic flair and gleaming hardwood floors on the quiet cul-de-sac in the suburbs of New England was no longer a comforting place to wind down after a long day at work. All the effort, and hours she’d labored into creating the perfect home, had been futile.
It would be sold.
Calista’s beloved job, as a High School English teacher, would likely change too. If it were up to her, she would leave the country altogether and head to Italy where she once dreamed of fleeing in her younger years. If it were only that easy. To go back. A chance at a do-over.
Despite a death grip hold onto the image in front of her nothing would ever be the same. The stark realization of what was soon to come almost left her breathless.
Calista spun a strand of hair between her fingers. The dark roots of her tinted auburn curls needed color. Perhaps, a honey brown? If only she could change the thick rings that surrounded her translucent jade eyes, like a rabid racoon. But given the stress, those would remain.
Could it be as simple as a variation in hair color, or a change of her name to simply disappear from her life? Calista. Meaning most beautiful. What a joke. She didn’t feel the least bit beautiful as she ran a hand across the minor bruise left on her right cheek. She had deserved that too. Every inch of black and blue was earned. But her skillfully applied makeup covered where it lay, just beneath the coverup. If she could only crawl into the woodwork and hide, where she could remain—forever.
News would certainly come out into the open; her reputation at Natick High school would be tainted. There would be whispering in the hallways upon her return to the classroom, come fall. Calista’s mind had skillfully skipped to this foreseen future on numerous occasions to watch it all unfold rapid fire before her own eyes. She gripped the sides of the bathroom counter, to steady herself from a sudden rush of vertigo.
There was no way to stop it now. Things were already in motion. The rolling on of her life, like a freight train, that she desperately wanted to halt, was already leaping the tracks to fast forward. Nothing would remain.
Every brick.
On her methodically arranged life.
Would crumble.
Change hadn’t been something Calista accepted willingly. But it was as if fate had stepped in and made up its mind on her behalf. So long had she held on tight to the secret. To the point that IT was no longer real—IT was fiction. Just something she’d scrupulously scripted like a screenplay in a book she’d hoped to pen someday. Time had ticked away, growing faster with each subsequent year, suppressing the secret deeper into her soul. Holding IT down so tight, she wondered how IT hadn’t made her physically ill, or worse, had killed her.
Calista’s hair, now caught by the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window, caused her to peer deeper into the mirror. She thought she’d caught a glimmer of grey. But thankfully, it was just a highlight from the mirror shining back at her. It wouldn’t be outside the possibility for her hair to turn. After all, her own mother had gone grey prematurely. And her personal calendar had recently flipped to forty, so there was that. She wondered how long her girlish figure would last. At five-foot-three, from the backend, she could easily pass for a teenager and would often turn to a surprised whistler, while taking a jog down her block.
Her thoughts were shockingly interrupted by a hard knock on the bathroom door.
“Maaa, you almost done in there? I gotta get to work.” The sound of her son’s voice carried through the hollow door, between them.
Calista did a doubletake to see if the bruise was completely covered before capping the makeup and tossing it into her cosmetic bag. She then opened the door and greeted her son, Devon, with a smile.
“You ready for your big trip?” Devon folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned his weight on the door casing as he watched his mother collect her things, before following her into the master bedroom.
Calista tossed the cosmetic bag into the suitcase that lay open on the bed, already filled with stacks of t-shirts and tank tops. She added a few swimsuits just in case she cared to cleanse herself in the cold Atlantic. Perhaps an icy baptism would right everything in her world.
“Honestly Dev, I don’t know how I feel about the trip,” she said finally after tucking the swimsuits neatly inside the suitcase. She then sank to the corner of the bed and cradled her head in her hands wishing to disappear.
“Whaddaya mean? You haven’t seen your friends…. In what has it been…? Like twenty years, or something like that? Dad told me he worked hard on this surprise for your fortieth, all on his own. Coordinating your friends’ schedules in a short amount of time was not easy. Believe me!” Devon’s eyes rolled. The eye roll Calista had come to make peace with, since her boy had grown past a gangly teenager.
“It’s complicated,” Calista said quietly.
“What’s complicated about it? Moriah Hart handled everything for you, right down to your Air B&B on the Cape. Dad and I thought it would be the motherload of gifts. Hell! It’s right on the beach!” he defended.
“Watch your language young man. You’re still not too old to be grounded, you know,” Calista teased, mimicking her teacherly undertone while standing on her tiptoes to bop him on the nose. She knew her correction would fall on deaf ears. And she was right, as he ignored her warning completely with a needless shrug. Calista removed a few t-shirts from the suitcase and re-rolled them before tucking them neatly back inside. There. That was better. Hopefully this would protect the shirts from unsightly wrinkles. At least that was one thing she could control.
“I don’t understand why you’re not over the moon about it,” he continued. “Or why you’ve been acting so depressed lately. When you have everything in the world going for you.” Devon held his hands firmly on his hips, and his golden eyes searched her face for an explanation. Her son’s hair, a darker shade than her own, was set up right off his forehead with gel and he looked as if his jaw could use a shave. Calista couldn’t understand how quickly Devon had grown from a toddler who ran between her legs, to a man who now towered over her. She turned completely away from the suitcase and reached for her son’s hands.
“I am excited, and I appreciate all you’ve done to help make this happen. A little trepidation is normal, I think. We haven’t spent time together in so long. I guess I just want it to go well.” She bit her tongue and held back the elephant in the room. The elephant, which was the reason she was making this trip in the first place. And the real reason, unbeknownst to her son, that her husband—his father— was forcing this trip upon her.
Devon’s gaze studied her. And his hands refused to drop hers, but he didn’t utter a word. He just waited with his brow creased in deep concern. It was as if he’d finally given up on trying to sway her mood.
“You know I love you, right Dev? You’ve always been the apple of my eye. The best son a mother could ask for.”
“Yeah, mom, I know. Since I’m your only child it’s kinda easy to claim that reward. Unless of course you count all the students who’ve been in your classroom over the years, then I guess there’s a little competition.” Devon shared a lopsided grin, and gave his mother’s hands a squeeze, before releasing them, and encasing her in a bear hug. “It’s gonna be fun for you… I promise,” he whispered in her ear.
Calista felt the strength in her son’s arms, but unfortunately the encouraging words fell flat. At twenty-two years old, he had grown almost a foot above her, and suddenly, she felt quite small. She held back a tear and cleared her throat.
“I’ll miss you,” she said, holding him at arm’s length.
“It’s not like you’ll be gone that long,” the infamous eye roll repeated. “But I’ll miss you too Mom,” he said lightly.
Devon didn’t know that the brief trip would change everything for him. No, he didn’t know that yet.
But it would.
Life, as he knew it, would never be the same. And it was all her fault.
