The Hollow Ground

After twenty years away, Cora Vane returns to Thornbury Hollow aboard the funeral train, stepping onto a cracked platform where coal smoke hangs in the wet air and nothing has been forgotten. She came home for the wake of a man whose name is stitched into every whispered scandal of the town, but staying may cost her everything. The Hollow has changed, and it hasn't. The Calloways still keep their grip on the church and the courthouse. The Marshes still run the rail line and the silence that comes with it. The Quinns still ask questions nobody wants answered. Wren Calloway, sharp-eyed and wary, meets Cora at the platform. Della Calloway offers tea and a warning. Beatrice Calloway says nothing at all. Detective Mae Tindall is waiting at the inn. Ezra Locke, who was there the night everything went wrong, has aged into a man who flinches at his own name. As Cora pieces the dead man's final hours together, through letters in the Hollow's archive, through Holt Granger's reluctant memory, through Lilah Marsh's careful omissions, a buried scandal surfaces from beneath the town's foundations: money moved in secret, a witness lost, a marriage that should never have happened. Every answer pulls Cora deeper into the loyalty and lies that bind her family to the Hollow itself. To find out who killed the man on the funeral train, Cora will have to break open ground her own blood helped seal. Some secrets, once unearthed, refuse to stay buried.