A stairway to the sea

Jeff Newberry

Some towns bury their secrets. St. Vincent lets the river carry them away.

Sheriff’s deputy Justin Everson has spent his life in St. Vincent, a fading mill town on the Florida Gulf Coast where the river runs dark and the past is never far beneath the surface. He knows its roads, its families, its grudges. Or he thought he did.

Still grieving his ex-wife and barely sleeping, Justin moves through his days in a haze somewhere between memory and dream. Then Donnie Ray Miles—a former high school bully and Iraq veteran with secrets of his own—drowns after a night of drinking on the Apalachicola River.

Everyone calls it an accident.

Justin doesn’t believe them.

The sheriff orders him to leave it alone. The county investigator threatens his job. Donnie Ray’s family won’t talk. And the deeper Justin digs into the dead man’s troubled return from Iraq, the clearer it becomes that nearly everyone in St. Vincent has something they’d rather keep buried.

Then Justin begins seeing Donnie Ray.

Whether the dead man is a ghost, a hallucination, or the product of a mind coming apart, Justin can’t say. But the questions won’t stop—and neither will he.

To discover what happened on the river that night, Justin must confront the secrets of a dying town, the ghosts of his own past, and a truth that will forever change the place he calls home.

Dark, haunting, and steeped in the rivers and forgotten towns of North Florida, A Stairway to the Sea is a literary crime novel about grief, memory, violence, and the terrible things that surface when a man refuses to look away.