Sweetwater Rising

Six months after Javier Montez went into federal custody, Sweetwater Beach is coming back. New paint on the bait shop. Nine boats in the marina where there used to be two. A resource center opening on Bay Street with a hand-lettered sign that says everyone welcome, and Marcus Johnson believes it, mostly, because he counted the boats himself.Then the calls start showing up in his neighbors’ phones. Same 813 number, four times to Deondra Williams before she thought to write it down. Then the signs. Three houses, three blocks, same brokerage, same Tampa number, going under contract in four days flat. That’s not a housing market. That’s a plan with a center.Marcus spent two tours learning how to read a room before it turns hostile. He’s spending this one reading a town before somebody sells it out from under the people who rebuilt it. His father runs the garage three blocks over and doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want answered. Maya, investigative reporter, former Marine, is already three interviews deep into a story she hasn’t told him yet, and the distance between what she knows and what she says is starting to cost them both something. Amber, sixteen years old with a battered flip phone and a habit of writing down numbers nobody else thought to keep, saw the pattern before any of the adults did.What’s coming for Palmetto Flats doesn’t carry a gun. It carries a phone number and a signature on a purchase agreement, and it counts on nobody looking closely enough to connect three houses on three streets to one buyer. Marcus looks closely. Reading a room before it turns is the one skill the Army never let him put down, and this time the room is the only home he has left.Sweetwater Rising is Wayne Ince’s second Marcus Johnson thriller, a story about what it costs to save a place twice, and who gets left holding the bill when the threat wears a suit instead of a weapon.