SALT TOWN

Terrell Gaines left Harrow Bay, Alabama at eighteen and spent twenty years making himself into someone who didn't have to come back. He built a life in Atlanta — a gym, a reputation, a quiet he earned with his fists and then with his patience. He told himself his brother was fine.

Then Andre turned up dead beside his own shrimp boat, and the sheriff called it an accident, and the entire town showed up to the funeral with condolences that sounded just slightly rehearsed.

Before Terrell can bury his brother and leave, there's the waterfront bar owner who was the last person to see Andre alive and is still carrying the guilt of not asking harder, a police report with a physical impossibility buried in line four, a family that owns the docks and the processing plant and the sheriff and expects the whole town to look the other way, late nights in a closed bar where two people with no reason to trust each other decide to anyway, and a photograph hidden inside a guitar case that changes the shape of everything.

Josie Strickland has been smaller than herself for three years — every decision filtered through what the family that holds her debt might do, her bar always one wrong move from gone. Terrell has spent twenty years building a life somewhere else, and he's only now understanding that leaving never actually solved anything.

Gulf Coast pulp thriller with a slow-burn romance built to earn every mile. The kind of book you start at midnight for one chapter and finish as the sun comes up, still thinking about the part where he said his brother's name.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Thrillers > Pulp sits at 6.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with ~51 estimated daily sales per top-20 title — strong demand against only ~7,500 titles; the entire category is undersupplied

→ Dual-category play with Crime Fiction > Vigilante Justice (6.2 sales-to-comp, Hot Mainstream) gives positioning in a higher-volume lane with ~89 daily sales per top-20 title

→ The "stranger comes to town" structure is Pulp's core demand driver — Salt Town delivers the archetype with a protagonist who is from here, which is the differentiation that earns word-of-mouth

→ The dual POV romance thread opens Romantic Suspense crossover without compromising the Pulp category signal — two shelves, two reader populations, one book

→ Crime Fiction > Organized Crime (6.9 sales-to-comp) creates a third also-bought lane — the Stovall operation maps directly to what that readership is looking for

TROPES: • Stranger comes to town (he's a returning son) • One man vs. the machine • Small-town corruption • Vigilante justice • Slow-burn romance • HFN • Woman who runs her own investigation • He says his brother's name loud • A photograph hidden inside a guitar case • The bar stool she hasn't moved • The debt that was always a trap • Righteous fury with a conscience

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate / Heat-Flexible — three intimacy scenes (Chapters 13, 18, and 26) built to dial from closed door to open door without breaking the outline; emotional core and HFN hold at every level

Perfect for fans of: S.A. Cosby, Sandra Brown, Tami Hoag, and Dennis Lehane

WHAT'S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category positioning (Thrillers > Pulp + Crime Fiction > Vigilante Justice), full Suspense Architecture with 7-clue fair-play ledger and red herring map, hidden timeline, and competitive analysis against three comp titles

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with two lead characters (Terrell Gaines and Josie Strickland), supporting cast of 10, Harrow Bay Alabama waterfront settings (The Driftwood, the Stovall processing complex, the festival site, the storm climax location), dual close-third voice system with distinct verbal patterns for Terrell (observational, controlled, boxing-inflected) and Josie (fast-thinking, bar-anchored, parallel tracks), four example passages per POV character, surface and hidden timelines, full clue-continuity and fair-play audit, content intensity guidance with heat-level tracking, and Harrow Bay series seeds

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 34 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word-count targets, scene breakdowns, clue-planting assignments (which clue, how disguised), concealment log (what each chapter must not reveal), and reader tension targets

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — detailed writing instructions for all 34 chapters and the epilogue with POV, scene beats, concealment instructions, clue-planting guidance, and distinct voice notes for alternating Terrell and Josie chapters; three heat-flagged chapters with explicit low-dial and high-dial versions

⭐️ Marketing Copy — Amazon listing with categories and 7 keywords, back cover copy, 50-word description, Instagram and Facebook copy, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, reader magnet concepts, series marketing framework, and Ideogram cover prompts (Prompt A 1:1 story scene, Prompt B 2:3 market-match cover) with full settings line

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table for three categories, five data-backed why-this-will-sell points, competitive positioning against two comp titles, seven-keyword strategy with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning including pricing, cover direction, and series strategy

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.