Sarah Avery’s reckless behavior has cost her a job, her boyfriend, and the independence she desperately craves. Reluctantly home for the holidays in the Bay of Fires, a tiny seaside town on the Tasmanian coast, she hopes for a calm, quiet visit, with time to reflect on all that’s gone wrong. Those hopes are crushed when, early one morning, she discovers the body of a young female backpacker washed up on the shore.

A year earlier, another woman went missing and hasn’t been seen since. Now everyone wonders: is there a killer in the brush? Or were these women victims of Tasmania itself? The island is place of savage beauty: pristine sand beneath orange-lichen covered granite boulders; heaving shadowy kelp fields; sweeping cold currents; crackling bush beyond the seashore. It’s also a landscape as flawed, vulnerable and vengeful as any human. Once its fragile peace is shattered, the locals’ anxiety fuels a string of speculations about happened to the women – and who might be the next victim.

When journalist Hall Flynn arrives to investigate, haunted by recent failures and yearning for a fresh start, he’s determined to do whatever it takes to break the story, and Sarah is his best source of local information. But Sarah – like everyone else in this close-knit town – has secrets she’s desperate to keep hidden. And one of those secrets leads straight to a killer’s door.

Haunting, evocative, as wildly atmospheric as the remote island where it takes place, Bay of Fires is a startling and wholly original debut.

One of CrimeReads Most Anticipated Books of the Year!

“This literary thriller paints as vivid a landscape as any book coming out this summer…Gee creates a lush, tantalizing world that readers will want to travel into deeper and deeper.”–CrimeReads

Celia Lily is rich, beautiful, and admired. She’s also missing. And the search for the glamorous socialite is about to expose all the dark, dirty secrets of Vanishing Falls…

Deep within the lush Tasmanian rainforest is the remote town of Vanishing Falls, a place with a storied past. The town’s showpiece, built in the 1800s, is its Calendar House–currently occupied by Jack Lily, a prominent art collector and landowner; his wife, Celia; and their four daughters. The elaborate, eccentrically designed mansion houses one masterpiece and 52 rooms–and Celia Lily isn’t in any of them. She has vanished without a trace….

Joelle Smithton knows that a few folks in Vanishing Falls believe that she’s simple-minded. It’s true that Joelle’s brain works a little differently–a legacy of shocking childhood trauma. But Joelle sees far more than most people realize, and remembers details that others cast away. For instance, she knows that Celia’s husband, Jack, has connections to unsavory local characters whom he’s desperate to keep hidden. He’s not the only one in town with something to conceal. Even Joelle’s own husband, Brian, a butcher, is acting suspiciously. While the police flounder, unable to find Celia, Joelle is gradually parsing the truth from the gossip she hears and from the simple gestures and statements that can unwittingly reveal so much.

Just as the water from the falls disappears into the ground, gushing away through subterranean creeks, the secrets in Vanishing Falls are pulsing through the town, about to converge. And when they do, Joelle must summon the courage to reveal what really happened to Celia, even if it means exposing her own past…