The Sea Keeper's Daughters is the tale of Whitney Monroe, a struggling restaurant owner whose life is upended when she inherits a historic hotel on the Outer Banks and discovers the long-hidden letters of a great-aunt who long ago left her wealthy family to become a Federal Writer. This new tale shares ties with The Prayer Box  and The Story Keeper through an old mystery involving the mountains of North Carolina and the Outer Banks. This novel wraps up the Carolina Chronicles.

I never know where my stories will come from, but an interesting thing happened when The Story Keeper hit the bookstores last year. Because the novel is about the discovery of an untold story, readers began sharing their own family tales with me. One reader mentioned that she'd traveled through the mountains many times as a child and one day had noticed that there were doors in the mountainside. When she asked about the doors, her father told her that, during the Depression, families who lost their farms would often move into nearby caves. Many people salvaged doors, windows, and furniture from their repossessed homes before leaving. They used those to outfit their new cave houses. I couldn't resist researching that tale, but I found very little information about people living in caves during the Depression years.

What I did come across were dozens of life history interviews and photographs produced by participants in a little-known WPA program called the Federal Writers' Project. During the Great Depression, the project hired impoverished writers, academics, lawyers, reporters and others, and turned them into Federal Writers. 
The Field Interviewers of the FWP were tasked with traveling the hidden corners of America and recording the stories of the everyday Americans.

The narratives they collected were fascinating, but what I really wondered about were the lives behind the pen. What was it like to be a Federal Writer, literally wandering the dusty back roads, looking to scare up stories?

The Sea Keeper's Daughters was born from that process of imagining the experiences of a Federal Writer. What does Whitney find in her great aunt's long-hidden field notes? Possibly, among mountain stories handed down by oral tradition, a clue to one of America's oldest mysteries.

I hope you'll enjoy The Sea Keeper's Daughters! If you're in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana or anywhere nearby, I hope you'll come join me on the book tour!