Synopsis

Grady Green, a bestselling author riding the high of success, loses everything in a single phone call. While driving home one evening, his wife Abby vanishes mid-conversation. Her car is found abandoned at a cliff’s edge, the door open, her phone still inside. The police assume suicide; Grady refuses to believe it. A year later, his career in ruins, Grady retreats to a writing residency on Amberly Island, a remote outpost off Scotland’s west coast, to begin again. The island is quiet, almost too quiet — inhabited mostly by women, governed by strange rituals, and haunted by its own tragedies. Then he sees her: a woman identical to Abby. As Grady investigates, he finds an unpublished manuscript eerily mirroring his marriage, fragments of Abby’s old research, and evidence that his own memory may not be trustworthy. Parallel chapters follow Abby’s point of view leading up to her disappearance, creating a duet of suspicion and longing. When the island’s tides trap him, Grady must untangle a web of deceit involving stolen stories, hidden identities and the blurred line between creation and destruction. Feeney turns every revelation against the reader’s expectations, leading to a final act that reframes both marriage and authorship as acts of possession.