The Drowned Ward
Author: Adrien Leiza (author page)
A lost child investigation, 20 years after.
Price: $ 5.99
Price: $
Blurb
A road crew repairing potholes in a Breton village finds human remains in the aggregate.
The bones belong to Ewen Ropars — a teenager who vanished twenty years ago. The official conclusion was a cliff collapse, a body lost to the sea. His mother has spent two decades grieving toward the water.
She has been mourning in the wrong direction.
Four people in the town know what happened that night. They were teenagers then. They made a pact — not from guilt, but from fear of the man who buried the evidence. He still lives among them. He still works the harbor. He has kept the silence for twenty years through the ordinary machinery of a small place: an inspection here, a rumor there, a sentence said once to the right person and never repeated.
Now a detective is following the paper trail. The permits do not match the tonnage. The dates do not survive scrutiny. The building that supposedly fell on its own was standing six months before.
The investigation pulls upward. The dangerous man pushes down. And four people who have carried the same lie for half their lives must decide what they owe the dead — and what speaking will cost the living.
Story
(Excerpt from “The Drowned Ward” by Adrien Leiza)
Soline chose the place in the end. Not the café. Not any of their homes. Not the harbor, where too many eyes already knew how to leave space around the wrong people. She had keys to the old volunteer room above the sailing club because the café sometimes stored spare folding tables there in summer when the terrace was open and the square overflowed. The room was never used in March except for lifejacket checks and school sailing forms. It had plastic chairs, a long table with a warped corner, and windows that looked across the basin toward the outer wall. The heating clicked but did not improve the air much. Somebody had left a coil of faded signal rope on the sill and a cardboard box of old regatta posters under the sink.
Élise got there second. Soline was already inside, coat still on, standing with both hands on the back of one chair as if she had only meant to stop for a minute and had somehow stayed. She did not kiss her cheek. She did not say hello. She said, “If he comes in here and starts telling me he doesn’t remember anything again, I am not going to help him by pretending that means the rest of us have to stop knowing what we know.”
Élise closed the door behind her. “Then don’t help him.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one he calls at two in the morning asking whether there was a window in the corridor or whether I’ve invented the window because saying there was a window makes him calmer.”
“You don’t have to answer those calls.”
Soline looked at her then with such plain exhaustion that the sentence fell where it stood and went no farther.
Format: eBook
Paperback: Coming soon
Length: Full-length novel, approx. 145,900 words · 543 pages (Kindle eBook)
Genre: Coastal mystery thriller / Procedural suspense
Story scope: Book 1 in the freestanding series “Faultlines”
Tone: Tense, windswept, grounded; community pressure and controlled dread rather than gore
Facts
Good to know: A body is found and the traces go back 20 years, as the story untangles in the small seaside village.
Explore further
More titles by Adrien Leiza are available on the
books page.
Ideal for readers who like: Small-community secrets, maritime atmospheres, investigations built from witness accounts and weak infrastructure, and thrillers where “procedure” can protect—or conceal.
Content note: Death by accidents, references to drowning/shipwreck loss, grief and sustained tension.