The Bride of the Hollow Maw

Turtleback Cove is built inside the skull of something too big to have ever lived. Nobody knows what it was. A lighthouse hangs upside down from one of its fangs, the parish bells are cut from its bone, and this season, under all of it, a wedding is meant to end a war: the Daughters of Syrul and the Brinejacks, joined by marriage, watched by four hundred guests.

On the twelfth bell, the bell that means begin, the bride goes out the window.

She crosses the rooftops in a gown built like a ship’s hull, cutting it away piece by piece as the alarm bells grind to life below. By morning every broadsheet in the Cove says she cut her groom’s throat at the altar. She never met the man. She never wanted the wedding. And the only soul willing to help her is a stranger wearing no gang’s colors and nobody’s name, who keeps answering questions she hasn’t asked yet.

She didn’t kill the groom. Proving it means unpicking the wedding itself, stitch by stitch, and the Cove’s finest liar is about to learn how much of her own life was sewn by somebody else.

A swashbuckling romance of rooftop chases, terrible aliases, borrowed knives, and drunk coopers, set in the world of the Turtleback Cove adventures.