A fifteen-year-old girl walks home from her best friend's house on a Saturday afternoon in late October. She never makes it.Halfmoon Crossing is a town with one road in. One Lutheran church. One diner. One closed mill. One school where the children of three valleys come for the day. The bluff rises six hundred feet on the north side of the river.Paige Whitford has been a private investigator here for four years, since both her Seattle homicide convictions came apart on appeal. She knows what guilt looks like. She knows what a system failing looks like. When Willa Forsberg's mother arrives at her door at seven in the morning, Paige already half-suspects what the sheriff will say when she calls him.What she finds two days later, in the crook of the cedar at the southeast corner of the cemetery, is small. Hand-carved. A face that is not Willa's. Eight tiny burn marks along the top edge.She has seen this work before. In two evidence photographs from two cities. Eight years apart.The man at the center of Halfmoon Crossing is its quiet, respected family doctor. He has been there nearly thirty years. He goes to church. He makes house calls. He says things to Paige across his desk that anyone listening would call kindness.She does not yet know how far back the pattern goes. By the time the truth begins to surface beneath the procedural, Paige understands she has stepped into something the doctor did not invent and cannot end on his own.A slow-burn psychological thriller with a folk-horror undercurrent. Book One of The Hollow Carved Faces.
