The Confession at Friday Harbor

What did Daniel Kessler see before the Salish Star vanished beneath the dark waters off San Juan Island?

In the summer of 1983, a small yacht left Friday Harbor with eight people on board. By morning, it was gone. The vessel was never found, and neither were the bodies.

More than forty years later, Daniel Kessler finally confesses to knowing what happened: the night the ship went down, two young lovers brutally murdered everyone aboard, then escaped before it sank. Kessler himself only barely made it out alive.

All these years, fear kept him silent. Now he’s ready to tell the truth.

Thomas Austin never expected to take a case on his honeymoon. But when the wreck of the Salish Star is discovered in deep water east of San Juan Island—along with four skeletons—Austin can’t walk away. Working alongside San Juan County investigators, he begins to dig into a crime everyone assumed was lost to the sea.

But the deeper Austin goes, the less the confession makes sense. What really happened aboard the Salish Star that night, and why did Daniel Kessler finally come forward after all these years?

In a case of buried secrets, shifting stories, and bones rising from the depths, Austin must uncover the truth about one terrible night on the water. Because if the confession is wrong, it means the real killer has been free for forty years.

And he may be closer than anyone thinks.