r/firstpage

Genre: Gothic Supernatural Thriller (folk-horror elements; shifts toward conspiracy-thriller in the back third)

Word count: ~77,500

POV/Tense: Third person limited, past tense

Status: Complete — Book 1 of a planned series, reads as a full standalone

Comps: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley x Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, with a forensic-procedural edge

Feedback wanted: Pacing, whether the reveals land in the right order; chapter-to-chapter tension; and overall engagement from start to finish. Open to line-level notes too, not just the big picture.

Content warnings: Murder (including ritual killing), drowning, gun violence, blood/autopsy detail (protagonist is a forensic pathologist), brief peril to a child character, grief and parental loss, arson, one character's death by drowning played for grief rather than horror

Synopsis:

Disgraced forensic pathologist Dr. Elara Vance is exiled to a remote island chain to catalog routine deaths—until her first case turns out to be a murder staged to look like an accident. Digging deeper, she uncovers a two-century-old bargain the island's founding families have kept with the sea: one life given up every seven years to buy the rest safety from the storms. The investigation pulls her into her own family's buried history—her mother disappeared chasing this same secret thirty years earlier—and into a conspiracy reaching far past one island's coastline.

Somewhere off Deadman's Shoal, a hand broke the surface. It rose pale and open-fingered, as if reaching for something just out of reach, then the swell folded over it and pulled it back under. No one saw. The gulls didn't even change their circling. The sea kept what it took and gave nothing back before it was ready. Nineteen miles east, the ferry coughed black smoke as it cut through the mist. Dr. Elara Vance stood at the bow, one hand gripping the cold railing, the other shielding her eyes from the brine-salted wind. Ahead, the Crag Islands loomed out of the fog like something half-dreamed—dark cliffs rising from restless water, the silhouettes of crooked houses scattered along their edges like teeth in a jaw that had taken too many blows. Gulls circled low, crying over the surf, their voices echoing across a bay that smelled of kelp and rusted chains and something under that, something she couldn't name yet. Three months ago she had stood in a courtroom that smelled of carpet cleaner and nothing else and listened to five men in gray suits decide whether her career was worth keeping. A pattern of insubordination, the review board chair had said, reading from a page he barely glanced at. She called it telling the truth. Now, exiled to a chain of islands most maps didn't bother to label, she was the reminder of mainland failure sent to catalog drownings, heart attacks, and fishing accidents far from anyone who might ask an inconvenient question.

Timeline: 3–4 weeks preferred, flexible if that doesn't line up with your schedule

Critique swap availability: Happy to swap—I can read and give feedback on chapters or a full manuscript in a similar genre (gothic, horror, thriller, or literary suspense), roughly matching the length/pace you're offering me.

Delivery: Comment below, and I'll DM you the manuscript—not posting the doc link publicly, per sub guidance.