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Thirteen Knots
Paperback
Series: The Shadow Protocols, Book 8
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 21 2025
Pages: 434
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.97 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
An impossible ship appears in the storm.
The man who boards it dies of old age in minutes.
When a diver climbs onto a ghostly wooden vessel that should not exist in a modern harbor, his body camera captures something no investigation can explain: a silver coin, a red glow, thirteen flashes of lightning, and a human body aging decades in less than a minute.
Major Cass Morgan is called to Pier Seven before the evidence can vanish. She is trained to trust procedure, not folklore. Secure the scene. Preserve the chain of custody. Follow the facts, no matter how strange they become.
But the facts refuse to behave.
The dead man's skin shows impossible trauma. The coin radiates a rhythm beneath the storm noise. A ship from another century leaves no clean trace. And hidden inside the pattern is a signal tied to Deep Gauge, a secretive network chasing artifacts that can bend time, memory, and flesh.
Cass has seen enough bad cases to know the first rule of survival: never let fear write the report.
Dr. Gabe Reyes, her field specialist and the one person stubborn enough to argue with her while saving her life, hears something in the recordings that should not be there. A pulse. A code. A repeated count of thirteen. As more artifacts surface, an astrolabe, an old rapier, a lighthouse mechanism, and a set of knots no knife can fully kill, the case turns from strange death to active containment.
Every object is connected.
Every connection has a cost.
And somewhere inside the signal is Ian, a man from Cass' past whose voice should be impossible to hear.
As the storm tightens around the harbor, Cass and Gabe are pulled into a race through morgues, museums, drowned military ruins, hidden rooms, and a lighthouse built over something older than its stone. Deep Gauge is not studying the artifacts. They are using them. Their plan could turn one controlled anomaly into a breach that reaches far beyond Pier Seven.
To stop them, Cass must do what she has always done: hold the line, protect the evidence, and make the hard call before anyone else understands the danger.
But this time, the evidence is alive with a rhythm of its own.
And when the final knot is cut, the threads may still remain.
Thirteen Knots is a tense supernatural procedural thriller about impossible evidence, buried grief, and the terrifying power of objects that remember more than they should.
Perfect for readers who want:
- A supernatural thriller grounded in investigation and evidence
- A high-stakes mystery built around cursed artifacts and hidden codes
- A strong female lead under pressure
- A sharp partnership with tension, trust, and dry humor
- Storm-lashed settings, secret experiments, and escalating dread
- A final twist that keeps the danger alive after the case closes
Some mysteries are solved by finding the truth.
Others are solved by surviving what the truth does next.
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