First published 2016
When the screen at a decaying drive-in theater crashes down and kills four people, Promise Falls is already on edge. Cal Weaver, a private investigator, gets pulled into the aftermath when a dead man's daughter hires him to look into a break-in at her father's house. What Cal finds goes well beyond a simple burglary. A hidden room in the basement shows signs of activity the owner clearly wanted no one to see, and a collection of DVDs has gone missing. Cal starts chasing the discs, then realizes the thief may not have cared about the discs at all. Something else was taken. Something worse. Across town, Detective Barry Duckworth is working two murders he believes are linked. One killing is three years old. Both victims carry the same distinctive wound. The cases refuse to stay separate. As Cal digs deeper into Promise Falls, the town keeps giving him new reasons to be afraid. The two investigations push toward the same dark center, and the people who thought their worst decisions were safely buried are about to find out they were wrong.
Genres: fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, fast-paced, gritty, suspenseful
Tropes: buried-secrets, dual-investigation, interconnected-mysteries
Setting: Promise Falls
Period: contemporary
492 pages · Paperback · Orion
Content warnings: murder, violence