Karl Pettersen waited fifty-six years to tell what he saw in the high country above his cabin.He told his pastor in March. He told his oldest friend at the diner in April. He was going to tell the sheriff next.He was killed in his cabin on a Tuesday evening in May, with his own rifle, three days before he could finish speaking.Seattle private investigator Paige Whitford is six months past a case she has not yet recovered from when Karl's daughter Magda calls her. The county sheriff has ruled the death a hunting accident. Magda does not believe it. Karl's private journal is missing. She wants Paige to come east, to a town she has never heard of, in country she has never driven into, where eight hundred people have been agreeing not to say something out loud for half a century.In Roan Creek, Washington, Paige finds a town that recognises her before she opens her mouth. A Lutheran pastor with a confession she cannot deliver. A retired forest ranger with a fifty-year-old field recording that carries a sound he does not have a word for. And, behind a stack of cordwood in Karl's woodshed, a blue mason jar that has been in the ground since 1972.Inside the jar is a list of six names.One of them is the late mayor of Roan Creek. The others live in five small towns scattered across the Pacific Northwest. What Karl carried for fifty-six years is older than 1971, older than Roan Creek, and the man who killed him to keep it buried is closer to Magda's kitchen table than either of them yet understands.Some silences keep small towns whole. Some silences keep small towns going. Some silences should never have been kept.THE CABIN ABOVE ROAN CREEK is the second novel in THE HOLLOW CARVED FACES, a seven-book series of slow-burn psychological thrillers set in the small careful places of the Pacific Northwest, following THE CARVER OF HALFMOON CROSSING. A literary suspense novel for readers who prefer their dread quiet, their detectives weary, and their mysteries built by accumulation.
