The boy did not run. The house took him.When fifteen-year-old Eli Barlow vanishes after football practice, Mercy Ridge is quick to call him a runaway. His father has a temper. His home life is messy. Boys like Eli, people say, disappear when things get hard.Detective Lottie Mae Surratt knows better.Eli's little sister Maddie is terrified, clinging to his hoodie and hiding the truth behind half-answers. She saw a man with blue-painted keys. She heard...

Book One of The Velvet AtlasSome secrets are worth millions. Others are worth killing to keep buried.When renowned historian Dr. Emilia Vale inherits her late father's research, she expects dusty manuscripts and unfinished notes. Instead, she uncovers the first clue in a centuries-old conspiracy powerful enough to rewrite history itself.Her search leads her to Venice, where forgotten archives, hidden passag...

The drought didn't just empty the lake. It woke up everyone it drowned.Eight years ago, Nathan Rell's son called him one last time. Nathan let it ring.Now Graywater is disappearing — the worst drought in sixty years pulling the lake back inch by inch, exposing a church steeple that shouldn't exist, a road that hasn't seen daylight since 1964, and a town called Covenant that the county flooded on purpose and never spoke of again.The water isn't just ...

The Creek That Carried NamesA Lottie Mae Surratt Novel · Book TwoMercy Ridge has buried its girls for decades. They just didn't count on Lottie Mae Surratt.When a woman is found facedown in the baptism creek behind Bethel Mercy Baptist, the sheriff calls it suicide and goes home for supper. Lottie Mae Surratt — retired detective, uninvited, and constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone — stays behind. She finds names carved into the stones beneath ...

Two weeks in Marrakech. One chest under a kasbah. Thirty years of names that were never meant to surface. The property is unremarkable — mud-brick walls, an old caretaker family, a storage room nobody has opened in four decades. Zara Kade is being paid well to assess it and ask no questions. She is very good at asking no questions. It is most of why she was hired. Then Soren Quinn walks into the riad courtyard, and the past two years arrive with him. They were partners once, in a business ...

A dead radio. A vanished children's choir. A hymn no one was supposed to remember.Detective Lottie Mae Surratt has learned that the dead do not call unless the living have lied first.When a twelve-year-old girl hears children singing from the locked balcony of an abandoned church, Lottie is pulled into one of Mercy Ridge's oldest wounds: the 1978 disappearance of the Canaan Ridge Children's Choir. The official story says the children were lost in a storm. But the church has...

Some vows are heard. Some are kept forever.When wedding planner Maren Holt transforms the abandoned Saint Adeline's church into a luxury wedding venue, she believes she has found the perfect business opportunity: old stone, stained glass, candlelit aisles, and enough history to make brides pay premium prices.Then the sealed confessional begins to speak.At first, it repeats private secrets no one should know. Then it begins confessing sins before the...

Some houses do not forget.When Mara Ellis returns to the isolated coastal house she once fled, she tells herself she is only there to settle family affairs, recover old memories, and finally put the past behind her. But Blackridge House has been waiting.Its rooms remember things Mara has tried to bury.A hallway changes when she looks away. A childhood bedroom holds objects that should not exist. Old grief rises through the walls like damp. And somewhere inside the h...