The Frost Beneath Stillwater
Nova comes home to Stillwater, a rain-battered Pacific Northwest town she's spent years trying to forget, and the past rises to meet her in a photograph of a girl no one will claim. Sheriff Dale Mercer treats the image as a curiosity; Margie Holloway treats it as a wound. But when Nova starts asking the wrong questions, the quiet fractures , a Voice begins threading through phone lines and police scanners, a Watcher materializes in her peripheral vision, and a Shooter takes a position nobody can find. Tom Eriksson and Edwin Pace, old friends with older debts, close ranks around secrets that have festered for decades, while Harlan Dodd and Cecil Moran circle with motives of their own. When Josiah Calloway surfaces with a warning and the FBI arrives with questions, Nova realizes the photograph is not a mystery to be solved but a fuse to be lit. Every answer she uncovers pulls the lake's bottom closer to the surface , and the thing watching from the water is no longer content to wait. To protect the people she once left behind, Nova must choose between the truth that will save Stillwater and the lie that has kept it breathing.