by Keith Rosson
First published 2026
Eli Lamp lives in a trailer at the forest's edge, keeping his missing daughter Hannah's room exactly as she left it ten years ago. The former detective destroyed his career searching for her and now works as muscle for the Crooked Wheel drug gang to survive. When someone brutally kills the boss's son in a baffling crime scene, Eli gets an ultimatum: identify the murderer and walk away debt-free forever. His investigation pulls him back into Hannah's disappearance through Avery Bryant, her best friend who saw her last. Together they uncover connections between the recent murder and Hannah's vanishing that stretch back decades. Something moves through the woods around them, black-eyed and clawed, while a conspiracy surfaces that ties together past and present tragedies. Eli must confront both human evil and supernatural forces as he searches for answers about his daughter and tries to solve a case that could finally set him free.
Genres: mystery, crime, horror, supernatural, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, gritty, haunting, suspenseful
Tropes: mystery-within-mystery, past-trauma, redemption-arc, unlikely-partnership
Setting: forest, trailer
352 pages · Hardcover · Random House
Content warnings: drug-use, murder, violence