By the Light of the Bluff: A Historical Fiction Novel of a Woman's Courage, Buried Secrets, and Finding Home in Post-Civil War Georgia (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798998957819)

2025 WINNER -- International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction

She didn't come to be found. She came to disappear.

Fleeing to the salt-kissed shores of Saint Simons Island in 1873, Jesse Whitmore arrives with her two children, a single carpetbag, and a past she cannot outrun. All she wants is invisibility--a weathered cottage beneath Spanish moss where no one asks questions.

But the island has its own plans.

When Jesse is offered the keeper's position at BluffLight--a lighthouse rising stone by stone on the eastern bluff--she finds herself drawn into something larger than survival: a community fighting to bring light to dangerous waters, an engineer named Jonas Miller who sees her more clearly than anyone should, and a web of smugglers, old grievances, and long shadows that reach all the way back to Richmond.

Her husband is still alive. He is still looking.

Set against the haunting beauty of Reconstruction-era coastal Georgia, By the Light of the Bluff is a richly atmospheric Southern novel of sanctuary, resilience, and hard-won belonging. From the tidal marshes to the lantern room of a rising lighthouse, every page carries the weight of authentic history and the scent of salt and pine.

For readers of Eugenia Price, Lisa Wingate, and Mary Alice Monroe.