Seventeen-year-old Avril doesn't believe in ghosts, but she knows there are lots of different ways for places and people to be haunted. Twelve years ago her mother drowned at Whisper Cove. Local legend claims that the women in the waves - the ghosts from an old whaling village - called her mother into the ocean with their whispering. Because, as they say at Whisper Cove, what the sea wants, the sea will have.

Avril has spent the past twelve years trying to make sense of the strange bits and pieces she does remember from the night she lost her mother. Stars falling into the sea. A blinding light. The odd sensation of flying. Now, at seventeen, Avril is returning to Whisper Cove for the first time as part of a summer theatre camp, and she hopes she might finally discover what really happened to her mother.

As Avril becomes more involved with camp director Willa and her mysterious son Cole, Whisper Cove reveals itself to her. Distances seem to shift in the strange fog. Echos of long-past moments bounce off the marsh. And Avril keeps meeting herself - and her dead mother - late at night, at the edge of the ocean.

The truth Avril seeks is ready to be discovered. But it will come at a terrible cost . . .