It really happened. That's what makes it unbearable.
On September 8, 1900, the deadliest natural disaster in American history came ashore at Galveston. In a single night, the storm killed as many as twelve thousand people — and most Americans have never heard of it. There was no seawall. There was barely a warning. By morning, a third of the city simply wasn't there.
The Storm's Alibi lives inside that catastrophe — not as backdrop, but as engine. Clara Whitaker comes to Galveston to confront a husband who has betrayed her in every way a man can. What she does in a room at the Tremont Hotel, she is certain the rising water will bury for her. It almost does.
So was the evidence.
But the storm leaves witnesses. A woman who survived. A policeman who finds a wound that doesn't match the debris. And a city that will spend a century not knowing what the water was really covering.