AN OLD FERRY, PAINT OVER RUST, ONCE SERVED A FEW OUTPORTS—NOW IT’S THE LIFELINE OF A CUT-OFF COAST, TRAPPING INNOCENT PEOPLE WITH A SERIAL KILLER. On Newfoundland’s storm-battered west coast, a landslide tears the only road into Blackwater Cove off the hillside and into the sea. The town is cut off now—just that tired old ferry when the weather holds and a run of coastline stitched with coves, small towns, tight harbours and nicks of woods along one grim stretch of highway where people have a way of disappearing. RCMP Major Crimes detective Claire Rowan doesn’t get sent to Blackwater Cove. She finds it in the back pages of a St. John’s paper: a young reporter, Eli Doyle, poking at twelve years’ worth of women gone missing along that same strip of coast—same season, same run of road, same kind of quiet, ordinary lives. The only detail that ever seems to stick is a sound: one half-asleep witness remembering the drag and clatter of a car with a loaded hitch fading into the dark. On the page, the pattern looks like bad luck. To Claire, it looks like something else—and it scrapes against an old wound, a night along this coast her family learned not to talk about and were told to leave alone. If she’s right, it isn’t the sea taking these women. It’s one careful, controlled predator working the same bit of highway and the same forgotten outports, season after season. With no mandate and no extra resources, Claire starts digging anyway—case files, ferry logs, old RCMP notes, the thin trail of rumours that runs between outport kitchens. When another woman, Martha Keating, vanishes from the Blackwater area, she finally has what she needs: a live case and an excuse to step onto the ferry and into the storm. In Blackwater Cove, the rhythm is tide, weather, and gossip. Atlantic squalls roll in fast, fog clings to the cliffs, and the rugged beauty of the place sits over something colder and more deliberate. Outsiders are watched. Questions travel from house to house and come back changed. Down by the fog-thick wharf, the lights of Victor’s Meats burn late, the butcher working alone in his spotless little shop, knives laid out in careful, gleaming rows. Cut off by landslide, storm, and a community that closes ranks around its own, Claire has one autumn to bring RCMP procedure and pattern to a coast that prefers stories and silence—to turn a string of “misadventures” into a case, and to stop a patient killer before another woman disappears into the fog. The Butcher of Blackwater Cove is the first novel in the Dark Shores: Newfoundland Noir series—a slow-burn Newfoundland crime thriller that blends small-town mystery, police-procedural detail, and the creeping dread of a serial-killer hunt against a rough, unforgiving coast that never gives back what it swallows.