Ruth Coe Chambers

author

“Chambers’ House on the Forgotten Coast left me in awe — of the well-crafted mystery and of the setting, a house filled with history and passion.”

House on the Forgotten Coast
by Ruth Coe Chambers
Fiction | 264 pages
Print: $16.15 | ISBN 978-1-63152-300-7
eBook $9.95 | ISBN 978-1-63152-301-4
She Writes Press
September 2017

 

Like a monarch surveying her domain, the house has stood for over a hundred years in the fishing village of Apalachicola on Florida’s northwest coast. She has known life. She has known passionate love. She has known brutal death. But she has guarded her secrets well . . .

Then eighteen-year-old Elise Foster and her parents arrive from Atlanta in their silver Jaguar, bringing with them their own secrets and desires. Seeking friendship in their new community, they find instead that the townspeople resent their intrusion. But this intrusion on the house’s privacy also provides a pathway for the past and the present to merge—and for the truth behind an unsolved murder to finally be brought to light. As you strive to solve the mystery, you and the Fosters are forced to address two critical questions: What is real? What is delusion?

mystery, suspense, magical realism, ghosts, history,  misfit, drugs, family, 1879, 1987, secrets, emotions, exploration, marriage, love, Forgotten Coast, Apalachicola, Florida, historic house, small-town life, Southern small town, Genre-bender, Gothic Literature, Historical Thriller Suspense, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Southern Gothic, Suspense, Thriller, Time Slip and/or Time Shift, Women’s Fiction

Cover for "The Receding Tide" by Ruth Coe Chambers

The Receding Tide

“The Receding Tide is for anyone who ever yearned for the embrace of home.”

It is 1973, and the Vietnam war has enraged and divided the country. Two childhood friends, one a widow and the other a divorcee, meet at midlife in their small hometown on the Florida coast and try to resolve the questions of how to handle life and love when separation and death have taken their toll. Will resolution bring peace, or will it mean pain to one or the other? Complicating their lives is the arrival of a former neighbor who returns to the site of her next-door home to continue the investigation of a possible family murder. She decides to rebuild her former home, and in so doing hires a drifter who appears to be a homeless person from some other town. The result is a climax in which old loves and old crimes bring unforeseen consequences.

EXCERPT
Read an excerpt online, or download a PDF.
 


The Receding Tide
by Ruth Coe Chambers
Bay Harbor Trilogy | Book Three

Fiction | 146 pages
Print: $16.00 | ISBN ‎ 979-8-89027-359-8
eBook $11.00 | ISBN 979-8-89027-857-9
Dorrance Publishing Company
April 25, 2024

Available where all fine books are sold.

T. H. Stone Memorial St. Joseph Peninsula State Park

House at 707 Long Ave., Port St. Joe, Forida. Courtesy of the Port St. Joe Library.

707 Long Avenue, Port St. Joe

Little girl with white cat standing in front of 1940s car. Courtesy of the Port St. Joe Library.

Could this be Anna Lee?

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