The Storm

by Rachel Hawkins

Genres: Gothic; Political Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins is back with a thrilling new gothic suspense set in a Gulf Coast beach motel where hurricane season can be murder.

St. Medard’s Bay, Alabama is famous for three things: the deadly hurricanes that regularly sweep into town, the Rosalie Inn, a century-old hotel that’s survived every one of those storms, and Lo Bailey, the local girl infamously accused of the murder of her lover, political scion Landon Fitzroy, during Hurricane Marie in 1984.

When Geneva Corliss, the current owner of the Rosalie Inn, hears a writer is coming to town to research the crime that put St. Medard’s Bay on the map, she’s less interested in solving a whodunnit than in how a successful true crime book might help the struggling inn’s bottom line. But to her surprise, August Fletcher doesn’t come to St. Medard’s Bay alone. With him is none other than Lo Bailey herself. Lo says she’s returned to her hometown to clear her name once and for all, but the closer Geneva gets to both Lo and August, the more she wonders if Lo is actually back to settle old scores.

As the summer heats up and another monster storm begins twisting its way towards St. Medard’s Bay, Geneva learns that some people can be just as destructive—and as deadly—as any hurricane, and that the truth of what happened to Landon Fitzroy may not be the only secret Lo is keeping…

Release date: January 6, 2026

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

June 21, 2025

43 Days Left

A/C is out in 217. Again.

It’s not the best text to get before six o’clock in the morning, but I’ve woken up to worse.

So I just realized that the smoked tuna dip we had last night had expired. SORRY!!!

Hi, it’s Nicole from the salon. Doooooon’t think you meant to send this text to me, lol.

Gen, I’m fucking tired of talking about this. It’s done. Don’t contact me again.

I haven’t deleted that one yet, and out of habit, I pull it up again, the words incongruous with my ex-boyfriend’s smiling face under his contact info. Chris sent that text more than eight months ago, and I’ve honored his wishes, but for whatever reason, as I sit on the edge of my bed this morning, the sunrise tinting my curtains pink, the waves softly shushing just outside, I find my thumbs moving across the screen.

About to go to battle with the A/C again. 217 remains cursed.

My thumb hovers over the send arrow even though I have no clue what this text might accomplish or even what I want it to accomplish.

Okay.

That’s not true.

I can already feel the summer bearing down on me, the weight getting heavier and heavier along with the heat and the humidity, and I want Chris to feel it, too.

We were supposed to do this together. This was our dream.

The phone buzzes in my hand, and for one heart-jolting second, I think he’s somehow sensed me on the other end, that he’s in his bed on the opposite side of the country, missing me, missing the Rosalie Inn, remembering the first night it had been officially ours. How we’d drunk champagne from plastic cups sitting on the front steps, our toes buried in the warm sugar-white sand.

But no, it’s just a follow-up text from Edie, my best friend and right-hand woman at the Rosalie.

Geneva, I have very sweaty guests in front of me, and it’s not even 7AM. Whatshisface at the HVAC place isn’t picking up, and I can only bullshit these people for so long. Come save me or I quit!

Another buzz.

And not “quiet” quit or whatever that bullcrap is, I will FOR REAL QUIT. Loudly and dramatically.

I smile at that, some of the heaviness lifting as I take one last sip of coffee. The sun may just be rising, but I’ve been awake for a while, my brain doing its usual spin cycle: How do we get more guests, does our Instagram suck, should I hire a social media person, and if I do, how exactly am I supposed to pay them, and why is more money going out than coming in, and would it be so bad to just put a huge fucking For Sale sign on this thing and walk away, and if I do that, what exactly am I supposed to do next given that I’ve maxed out every credit card I own trying to keep this thing afloat, and why why why why WHY did I let Chris talk me into selling everything I owned and taking on the inn after everything with Mom, even with the massive mortgage on it, and God, how nice it must be to be Chris, washing his hands of the whole thing and walking away because for him, this was just a bad investment, not an entire fucking family legacy to uphold.

Sighing, I open my front door and step out, humid, salty air settling over me like a physical weight. Every other owner of the Rosalie had called the inn home, including my parents and grandparents, but when Chris and I had taken over, he’d been creeped out by the idea of actually living in a hotel.

I’ve seen The Shining, I’m good had been his line, and it had always irritated me because it wasn’t even a good joke. A rambling beach motel was hardly a terrifying fortress high up in the snow-covered Rockies. We weren’t going to get trapped in it. Besides, I’d grown up there, and I’d survived.

Still, we’d ended up buying an Airstream and set it up just a little ways down the beach, a handful of short, scraggly pines between us and the inn.

Well, now just me and the inn.

The distance is more mental than physical, to be honest. The inn is big and painted pink, for fuck’s sake, so it would take more than a few sad little pines to block the view. But it makes me feel better, this little “walk to work” I do every morning, the Gulf on my right, sand dunes gently undulating on my left. The water is calm today, smooth and glassy as a lake, and I watch a pelican dive, the splash overly loud in the quiet near-dawn.

This stretch of beach outside the Rosalie is public—my mom and her dad before her never wanted to fight that, knowing the last thing you should do in a tourist town is piss off the locals—but this time of day, it’s almost always empty.

Today, there’s one lone figure on the beach, an old guy in salt-stained khaki shorts, his skinny chest bare and slightly concave, his skin so tanned he looks like he’s been carved out of wood. He’s got a fishing pole in his bony hands, the surf splashing against his calves, and when he catches sight of me, he lifts a few fingers in a barely-there wave.

“Hey, Cap!”

He has an actual name, I’m sure, but he’s been “Cap” as long as I can remember, even if no one in town knows if he actually was a captain at some point in his life.

“Or maybe he just wore a funny cap one time back in 1973, and that’s why it stuck,” Edie had once suggested over a couple of beers in the inn’s courtyard. “This is the South, after all. I once knew a sixty-four-year-old man who went by ‘Scoop,’ because he was on a newspaper staff. In middle school.”

In any case, Cap is a frequent visitor to this beach even though I’ve never actually seen him catch anything. He’s a reminder of what I love about this place and that, like it or not, it’s always been home.

You didn’t just do this for Chris, remember? You grew up on this beach, you’ve got roots here, you know the people, the places, the weird little bits of lore that make up every small town. This was your dream, too.

And when I turn and step onto the low wooden boardwalk that leads to the inn, my sandals gritting over the sand that always dusts the boards, I think the Rosalie Inn does look like a dream.

If I were anybody else, I could stop and admire it, the charm of its color—somewhere between coral and Pepto-Bismol—and how the white gingerbread trim glows against it. I could smile at the rocking chairs on the front porch, the big baskets of begonias waving gently in the sea air, the morning sun sparkling on all the wide windows facing the Gulf. I could think what a miracle it is that this building has stood here for almost a hundred years despite storms that flattened other, newer dwellings.

But I’m not anybody. I’m her current steward and the woman who signs all the checks, which means that, rather than stand here on this gorgeous June morning, drinking in the sight of my family’s legacy, I’m noticing that the third step leading up to the porch is loose, and that the paint is already flaking off the shutters nearest the door even though we just painted those last winter. I’m thinking that we should probably replace said door after this summer, and wondering if there’s room in the budget for another housekeeper.

“Girl, if that frown gets much frownier, there will not be enough Botox in all of Alabama to help you.”

I’d been so focused on the never-ending tally of things that make up running a place like this that I hadn’t even noticed Edie on the front porch, one hip cocked against the railing, a thermal mug in hand.

I hurry up the steps, and she hands me a second mug of coffee that was sitting on the railing before saying, “No need to rush. Whatshisface finally picked up his phone and should be over here in ten minutes or so, and I had a few of those certificates for a free dinner at Shrimp ’N’ Shells still hidden in the front desk, so our overheated guests have chilled out in spirit if not in body.”

“They’re still going to want a refund, watch,” I say with a sigh as the shell wind chimes just overhead smack together, their delicate strings tangling.

“If they do, send them my way,” she tells me, lifting a pierced eyebrow.

Edie is what people down here would call “a character.” She turned up in St. Medard’s Bay about three years ago, originally from Natchez, Mississippi, one of those women who could’ve been thirty-five or sixty-five, it was nearly impossible to tell. And even in a town as quirky as St. Medard’s Bay, she stood out with her brightly colored hair—purple at the moment, after a turquoise phase back in the winter—that eyebrow ring, and her tendency to wear flannel shirts and jeans even when it’s hotter than hell outside.

I’d met Edie when she was working at Grindz, the subpar coffee shop on St. Medard’s main drag, and liked her immediately. So much so that I’d found myself hanging out an extra ten, fifteen minutes every time I got coffee there, and when she’d told me she was hoping to find something a little more challenging than making eight thousand iced lattes for people in Salt Life T-shirts, I’d offered her a job at the inn.

Her official title is “assistant manager,” but like everyone who worked here, she did a little bit of everything. She’d work the front desk, handle bookings, pick up the coffee and pastries we put out every morning for the guests. She’s even scrubbed a toilet or twelve, and honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without her.


Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Hawkins