In a town built on tides and trust, the deadliest lures are the ones we cast ourselves.

When a young man vanishes from the Weyport waterfront, Sheriff Angus Reid expects to lead the search.

Instead, he becomes the prime suspect.

The evidence is impossible to ignore: a money trail, encrypted messages, a witness who places Angus’s truck near the missing man’s apartment, and a town that loves him but is starting to ask questions it never expected to ask.

Someone has built this carefully.

Someone who understands the law.

Someone who knows Angus’s past.

Someone with a score Weyport doesn’t realize is still unsettled.

As the case turns against him, Angus faces a choice that cuts deeper than any accusation: fight to clear his name inside the law he has sworn to uphold, or cross the line his brother once crossed — and become exactly the man someone is trying to prove he is.

But Jonah Holt is still missing.

And the longer Angus waits, the more deadly the lure becomes.

Jonah’s Lure is a gripping Christian mystery thriller and small-town coastal suspense novel about desire, deception, justice, and the traps we walk into willingly—and the grace that calls us back before we’re pulled too far under.

Perfect for readers who enjoy clean suspense, coastal mysteries, and character-driven Christian crime fiction.

Book 8 in the bestselling Angus Reid Mysteries series.

Prologue

The engine was off. Had been for two hours.

He didn’t mind the cold. Cold was among the least of what he’d learned to manage. He sat with his hands loose in his lap and watched the front of the building across the street the way a man watches something he’s memorized but still wants to check.

Third night. Same as the first two, mostly.

The deputy’s truck arrived at seven fifty-two. The lights in the front office came on at eight oh four—after the coffee was made, judging by the sequence of movement visible through the glass. The medical examiner’s vehicle came and went twice on Tuesday, once on Wednesday. The sheriff’s truck—dark green, older model, one dent above the rear left wheel arch—stayed until six forty-three on Tuesday. Seven twenty on Wednesday.

The man worked long. He cared about the work.

That was worth knowing.

He knew this town. Knew it the way you only know a place you were born into—every street, every family of consequence, every unspoken arrangement that kept things running the way they were supposed to run. He spent decades here. Gave the best of himself to these streets and the people on them, and they knew it. They respected him for it. He earned that respect the hard way, through work most men wouldn’t do, decisions most men didn’t have the spine to make.

Then it was taken from him.

Not through anything he did that wasn’t justified—he made his peace with the decisions themselves, worked through that accounting in long slow stretches when there was nothing but time and a narrow window facing north. What couldn’t be accounted for so neatly was the method of the taking. The way one man walked into a town that ran perfectly well without him, made himself agreeable and capable and present, and used that position to dismantle what took thirty years to build.

The town didn’t question it. That was the part he returned to, the way you return to a stone in your shoe—not the pain exactly, more the insistence of it. His decades of service, his name on every major decision this town made through flood and storm and hard winters—none of it held.

One man. One set of allegations. And Weyport folded like it owed him nothing.

It owed him everything.

He intended to collect.

Prison gave him time he didn’t request and couldn’t refuse. He used it the way he always used available resources—methodically, without waste. A plan built in stages. Not from anger; anger was a fuel that burned fast and left you stranded. What drove this was something that didn’t require feeding. The certainty that a wrong was done and that he was the only one positioned to correct it.

The man in that building took his badge, his name, and the town’s story about itself.

All three were coming back.

Movement caught his eye.

A young man came out of the hardware store two doors down from the diner, a paper bag under one arm, keys in the other hand. Late twenties. He crossed the street with the walk of someone who decided what confidence should look like and was practicing the details—shoulders set, head up, that certain forward lean of a man who believes he’s walking toward something that’s been waiting for him.

He knew that walk. Knew what produced it.

There was a hunger that sat behind it—not greed, nothing so simple. Something more specific and more useful. The need to be seen by the right person and found sufficient. Men who carried that need announced it in small ways, in how they entered rooms, in how they responded when someone with authority paid them attention. They lit up. They leaned in. They gave you more than you asked for because they confused being asked with being chosen.

This one worked the waterfront. He knew the family, knew the operation—made it his business to know, in the weeks since he arrived back in Weyport, which families still carried weight in the town and where the fault lines ran inside them. The father was the name on the building. The son was the one who wanted to be.

Three weeks he had a number for him. He hadn’t called yet. He read first, checked the distance assessment against what the street showed him.

The walk confirmed it.

The young man stopped outside the diner and looked at his phone. Unhurried. Expectant. The posture of someone waiting for the moment he’d earned to arrive.

He picked up his phone.

Across the street, the light in the sheriff’s front office burned steady. It would keep burning until the man inside decided he’d done enough for one day and drove home to his dog and his clean conscience and his unearned reputation.

Not for much longer.

He dialed. Let it ring once. Waited.

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