Nora Blythe has spent eleven years in Chicago, working in a photo archive, keeping the smell of salt and marsh out of her life. Then her mother dies, and she comes home to Gull Creek, North Carolina, to sell the cottage, sign the papers, and be gone by September. Instead she finds a hidden roll of film from the night her sister drowned twenty-six years ago - and one photograph in it proves that the man Gull Creek trusts most has been lying ever since. As the town splits over its future and a hurricane bears down on the coast, Nora has to decide what the photograph is worth: the truth about her sister, or everything she has left to lose. THE SALT LINE is a Southern literary mystery with a love story at its center.