Description

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.