The Drowning District

In the rain-rotted port city of Marrowbone, where the river claims two streets every decade and the fog carries whispers, private eye Silas Vance takes a case from his dead sister's husband—a man who shouldn't know she's dead yet. Someone is leaving drowned things on doorsteps in the flooded Ward Nine: cats, dogs, eventually people, all perfectly preserved, all wearing the same porcelain smile. As the water rises early this year and the old families start locking their basements from the inside, Silas must navigate crooked dockworkers, a tuberculosis sanatorium with no patients, and his own gathering certainty that the river has begun choosing who walks back out of it.

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