The Hollowing Season
Maren Ashworth hasn't spoken to her sister in eleven years. Now Eliza is dead, and Maren has come to the remote town of Briarvale to sort through what she left behind: a drafty house at the edge of a dying orchard, a stack of unpaid bills, and a leather-bound journal written in a hand that grows more frantic with every page. The townsfolk are polite in the way that means don't ask questions. The reverend keeps steering her toward a burial she didn't authorize. The sheriff watches her drive past his window every afternoon. And there are six dolls in Eliza's parlor, arranged in a semicircle around a cold hearth, that no one in town will explain. As the hollowing season settles over the valley, Maren begins to understand that Eliza didn't die so much as disappear, and that something in the walls of the old house has been waiting for another Ashworth to come looking. With the help of Dr. Linnea Crow, an outsider with her own reasons for fearing the dark, Maren must read her sister's final warnings before the same thing that took Eliza returns for her. The truth is already in the journal. The only question is whether she reads it in time, or whether she becomes the next voice calling from the other side of locked doors.