First published 2025
Annie Gore parks her truck at the edge of an Appalachian holler and already knows this place. Not this exact town, but the shape of it. The closed faces. The way a mountain community seals over its wounds. Ten years ago, three girls vanished from this small North Carolina community. One came back. Two never did. Now the brother of one of the missing girls has gone looking for an outsider who can still read the terrain, and he found Annie. She is a former Air Force Special Investigator who left the mountains right after high school and never planned to return to anything like them. She is also broke, so she takes the job. What she finds is a town that has spent a decade choosing not to remember. Folklore about witches and crows runs through the old stories. Secrets have had ten years to calcify. And somewhere in that holler, Annie's digging stirs someone who had counted on the past staying buried. Archer Sullivan grew up in Appalachian North Carolina, and every detail of the landscape and culture earns its place on the page.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, mystery, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, haunting, suspenseful
Tropes: cold-case-investigation, outsider-returns-home, past-resurfaces, unreliable-community
Setting: Appalachian North Carolina, North Carolina
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
308 pages · Hardcover · Minotaur Books
Content warnings: death, murder