Salt Bridge

Seven rules. One bridge. No more overnight lies.

Salt Bridge is a quiet island community with seventy-one homes and one way off: a low gray causeway built in 1968. The homeowners are paying $4.6 million to repair it. Retired math teacher Ruth Akers has counted its piles at low tide for thirty years. She has always counted thirty-two. The contract bills for forty-eight.

Handyman Cole Brandt and his partner Dee Mercer are hired to inspect it in daylight, in pairs, with cameras, and no soft opens. The polished community manager approves: inspectors work daylight only. That suits Cole fine. Daylight is his rule too.

Then the crack monitors on the channel bent open overnight in calm weather. The riprap moves on its own. Somebody is cutting the piles under the waterline in the dark, and every invoice in the project runs through one mans laptop.

Juliette Marchand follows the paper to a Mount Pleasant mailbox that once belonged to Linus Pells shell companies, and she decides it is time to be a lawyer again. Delphine Harrow brings Arthurs thermos, his silver compass, and a trunk of drawings by the engineer who built the bridge. Caretaker Roy Gadsden, whose grandfather drove the piles, has seen trucks at two in the morning.

A king tide is coming. Cole wont break his rule, and he wont let anyone else be on that bridge at night.

Salt Bridge is the fifth Honey-Do novel: a Lowcountry romantic suspense with found family, a sharp-witted older heroine, and explicit, kinky on-page romance between consenting, sober adults. It can be read on its own. All romantic participants are adults over 21.