Arla Jones

A woman dies on a shark dive off the north shelf. The Coast Guard calls it an attack. An unfortunate encounter with a predator in open water. Case closed. Marco Santos doesn't agree. He was monitoring the dive from the surface vessel. He saw it on sonar-behavior that didn't match any known hunting pattern. No strike cycle. No feeding response. No escalation. Just. observation. And something that looked almost deliberate.
Marco begins keeping a private log. Not of what the reports say happened, but of what the instruments recorded when no one else was looking. Movement patterns that repeat across months. Depth signatures that shouldn't persist in a single animal. Interactions that suggest coordination, not instinct. Then he finds older data. Archived expedition records from the 1960s. After nuclear testing in the central Pacific, deep trench surveys began reporting anomalies in marine behavior-signals dismissed at the time as sensor error, equipment drift, statistical noise.
But the pattern never stopped. It only went quiet. Until now. Whatever is in the water is not behaving like a single organism. It is not behaving like anything catalogued in modern marine biology. And the longer Marco studies it, the more certain he becomes of one thing:It is not reacting to humans. It is studying them. And it has been doing so for longer than anyone realized. Marco Santos is not the man meant to understand what is happening beneath the waves.
But he may be the only one who notices when the ocean stops pretending it is empty. Ghost Water is the prequel to The Ghost Shark and the opening volume of The Chorus Below series. A sea survival thriller with a hard-science-fiction evolutionary anomaly.