Georgia's Golden Isles, the Carolina coast, and the quieter parts of Florida. Where history runs deep and the tide keeps its own time.
"You remind me of Pat Conroy's writing."
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BluffLight Series · Book 1
A woman in hiding. A lighthouse. A second chance on Georgia's Golden Isles.
Saint Simons Island, 1873. Jesse Whitmore arrives with her two children and a past she refuses to name, looking for nothing more than a place to stop running. But as a new lighthouse rises from the eastern bluff, she's drawn into its construction, and into the path of the man building it. Then the past she fled begins to close in.
Winner, 2025 International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction
Cape Fear Thriller Series · Book 1
A sunken boat. A family secret. And a harbormaster who won't let it stay buried.
Nora Banks is the harbormaster of Southport Marina on the Cape Fear coast of North Carolina. When her cousin Mary surfaces with evidence that the sinking of the Miss Carolina, the accident that killed three people and broke Nora's father, was no accident at all, Nora is pulled into an investigation that reaches deep into the power structure of Brunswick County.
What the tide took, it kept. Until now.
BluffLight Series · A Christmas Story
A light built to warn ships away. One Christmas Eve, it brought someone in.
Saint Simons Island, 1876. A stranger follows the lighthouse beam across the water, looking for an end. What he finds is a family willing to leave their door unlocked, even when he gives them every reason not to.
A 25-minute read. Return to the world of By the Light of the Bluff.
It stands on its own, or reads as a Christmas visit back to Jesse and Jonas, three years on.
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Each series begins with a free short story, yours when you join the list.
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A Christmas Eve story at BluffLight. A stranger arrives carrying little more than a name and an old sorrow. Jesse and Jonas open the door.
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A free short story · Cape Fear River, Southport NC
Meet Nora Banks before everything changed: before the marina, before the job, before she learned what silence can cost.
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Cape Fear Thriller Series · Book 2
She kept the secret to protect them. That was the mistake.
A gill-netter comes down B-dock at dawn, dark at an hour she has no business being dark, her net still piled wet on the deck. Divers find her captain off Battery Island by four-thirty.
These things happen on the water, the county marine unit tells Harbormaster Nora Banks. But the dead man's boat was paid off. He owed nobody. And his transponder went dark for two hours in the night. A clean stop, a clean start.
Some truths sink. When the tide turns, they rise.
A Novel
Some lights guide you home. Some ask you to stay.
Darcy is a floor nurse in Crystal River who knows how to care for people and is less certain what to do when someone tries to care for her. Wade comes to look at her backyard and reads the ground before he knows the first thing about her: the grade runs toward the fence instead of away from it, and nothing she planted ever had a chance. Then a publisher in Savannah takes his novel, and the offer carries a condition. A year, maybe two. Four hours away.
A novel about the harder, braver work of staying.
A Novel of the Florida Fern Country
He is young. He is good at it. And he does not yet know what he is helping to build.
Fern Park, 1934. Curt Tyner is a young surveyor who can read ground better than anyone alive, and he goes to work for Hibbard Casselberry, the man building a town on it. Through freezes, a land fight, and a new name going up on the map, Curt learns too late that the most consequential thing he will ever draw is a line deciding who belongs inside it.
For about forty years, the ground between Orlando and Sanford grew most of the world's cut fern, under roofs of lath that ran unbroken over sixty and ninety acres at a stretch.
Blake Gunnels, Author, writes fiction set along the Southern coast, using invented characters to carry readers into real places he knows deeply: the marshes of Saint Simons Island, the waterways of coastal North Carolina, and the harbors and barrier islands where history never stays buried for long.
By trade, he is a landscape architect. His working life is spent helping restore worn places (communities, resorts, and coastal properties) and helping them find their way back. That same instinct runs through his fiction: the belief that second chances matter, that places carry memory, and that most people are trying, in their own way, to find solid ground.
When he is not writing or designing, he is somewhere on the water with Tammy, looking for the next unmarked trail and the perfect margarita.
He is the author of By the Light of the Bluff, The Christmas Keeper, and the Nora Banks Cape Fear Thriller Series.
Contact Blake: blake@blufflight.com
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"By the Light of the Bluff is a powerful, sweeping narrative that will capture the reader's attention from the very first lines... The lighthouse, with its powerful beam cutting through the darkness, was the perfect analogy for the way the caring and loving community of Saint Simons managed to cut through Jesse's darkness and flood her doubts, suspicions, and life with love and light. I highly recommend this read."
— Grant Leishman, Readers' Favorite"A beautiful, well-written story of growth, strength, and resilience. Couldn't put the book down — a true inspiration to those who struggle with regaining inner strength."— joann m ciaffaglione · Amazon Verified
"Made you feel as if you were on St Simons and part of the island life. This book will have you thinking about the characters long after you put it down."— Amorton · Amazon Verified
"I couldn't wait to know the ending but was enjoying the book so much I didn't want it to end. I'm looking forward to the sequel."— Linda B · Amazon Verified
"You remind me of Pat Conroy's writing. The descriptions of St. Simons surroundings and the characters in your book draw you into 1873 living on the island."— Jill Sluder · Amazon Verified Reviewer
The coast remembers more than it shows. These are stories about what surfaces, and what doesn't.
Find Blake In Person
Confirmed public appearances where readers can meet Blake, browse the books, and pick up signed copies.
Confirmed
Lake Eola Park · Orlando, FL · Booth C14 · Signed copies available
Recent Events
Past
Crafts in the Village · St. Simons Island, GA
Past
Shelf Life Books · Altamonte Springs, FL · 1:00-3:00 PM
Past
Crafts in the Village · St. Simons Island, GA
Only confirmed public, in-person appearances are listed here. More events will be added as they are accepted and confirmed.
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