Harriet Ellison Writes Join the reader list
A lighthouse lamp glowing through heavy fog on the Maine coast at dusk

Portland, Maine · Mystery novelist

Harriet
Ellison
Writes

The fog hides everything but the truth.

Coastal Maine mysteries — and everything that grows around them. Book club kits, author talks, writing workshops, and a letter that finds you wherever you are.

Read the novels Join the reader list
A closed hardcover book with a plain red cloth cover standing on wet stone in harbor fog
Harbor fog, low tidePortland, ME
Signal · keep scrolling

01 — The novels

Fog, tide, and the things people bury.

Harriet Ellison writes mysteries from the cold edge of Maine, where the harbor keeps its own hours and no two people remember the same night the same way.

A writer's desk at night with a typewriter, stacked books and a warm lamp
Desk, lateThird draft
  1. 01

    Weather as a character

    Sleet, a tide that comes in wrong, fog thick enough to lean on. The coast sets the pace of every chapter.

  2. 02

    Small harbors, long memories

    Everyone on the dock knows something. Nobody says it first. The plot turns on who speaks, and when.

  3. 03

    The quiet turn

    The dread lives in the detail — a wet rope, an unmade bed, a lamp left burning in an empty house.

Join the reader list Book club kits

02 — Book club kits

Signal flags for your reading group.

Kits made for groups who want to stay in the weather a little longer — questions worth arguing about, and a few ways back into the dark.

Questions to start with

  1. — · Whose version of the night do you believe, and what made you trust them?
  2. · — At which point in the book did you first feel that something was already wrong?
  3. · · Who is still lying when the last page turns — and did you mind?
Ask about a kit
A small book club talking around a lamplit table with open books and mugs
A group, mid-argumentChapter eleven

03 — Author talks

A foghorn, then a voice.

Readings and conversation for libraries, bookstores and book clubs — wherever a room can be made quiet enough.

Talk dates reach the reader list first.

Ask about a talk
  1. 01

    The reading

    A chapter read out loud in a room with the lamps turned down. It lands differently when someone else is listening.

  2. 02

    The weather report

    Where the story came from: the harbor, the fog, and the first line that would not leave the desk alone.

  3. 03

    The questions

    Ask anything. The best ones have a habit of turning up again in the next book.

04 — Workshops

The keeper's log.

Workshops on how suspense is built — line by line, draft by draft, for writers who read too late at night.

A hand writing in a lined notebook beside a cup of coffee on a wooden table
Notebook, third draftMaine

Entry 01 — The light in the fog

Write the same room twice: once in flat daylight, once at two in the morning. Change nothing but the light, then see which version knows more.

Entry 02 — The wrong tide

Take a scene you have already written and make the weather work against your character. Nothing else changes. Watch what the scene does on its own.

Entry 03 — Say it once

Write the sentence your character would never say out loud. Then write the seven lines around it that keep it buried.

Ask about a workshop

05 — The newsletter

A message in a bottle.

Letters from the coast: new work, upcoming readings, and the pages that never made it past the harbor.