by Mark Edwards
First published 2021
Tom is a journalist with a failing marriage and a career going nowhere. His teenage daughter Frankie lives across an ocean. When he finally gets time with her, he picks Hollow Falls, a cabin resort tucked into the woods of Maine, hoping the trip will close some of the distance between them. It does not go as planned. The resort feels wrong from the start. Wind chimes ring through the trees at odd hours. Something moves in the dark between the pines. Then Tom meets David and Connie, a pair of true-crime podcasters who have come to Hollow Falls for a specific reason. Twenty years ago that week, two people were killed there. The resort shut down. Nobody was ever charged. Now the anniversary has drawn a crowd of murder tourists, all of them circling the same cold case. Tom starts asking questions. The answers pull him and Frankie deeper into something that the woods around Hollow Falls seem determined to keep buried. He came here to be a better father. Now he has to decide whether finding the truth is worth the risk of losing his daughter entirely.
Genres: suspense, mystery, horror, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, eerie, suspenseful, tension-filled, unsettling
Tropes: father-daughter-relationship, mystery-investigation, secrets-buried, unreliable-setting
Setting: Hollow Falls, Maine, The Hollows Resort
Period: 20 years ago, present day
335 pages · Paperback · Thomas & Mercer
Content warnings: death, murder