A burned‑out Wall Street whistleblower. A woman on the run with six million in illicit Bitcoin. A sinking island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. The Last Tide is a coastal noir thriller in the moody, first‑person tradition of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, set against the fading edges of Virginia’s Northern Neck and the vanishing marshes of Tangier Island. Roger Phelps thought he’d left chaos behind when he exposed a multibillion‑dollar fraud, put eight executives in prison, and walked away with a whistleblower’s reward and nothing resembling peace. He retreats to Reedville, Virginia, a quiet fishing village at the literal end of the road, planning to spend his days fixing up an old Victorian on Cockrell Creek and learning the tides instead of the markets. Then Kathy Carter steps off a plane from Miami. She’s beautiful, wary, and traveling too light. She rents Roger’s weather‑beaten cottage on Tangier Island—an isolated community slowly being swallowed by the Chesapeake. As their guarded friendship deepens into a taut, unspoken attraction, the truth surfaces, and it explains why she is on the run. With a nor’easter bearing down and the island cut off by weather, Roger is forced out of his self‑imposed exile. Some people live on borrowed land; others live on borrowed time.