The Quarry Lights

Three months of drought have bled Blackhollow Reservoir down to cracked concrete and bone-pale mud, and what surfaces in the emptied basin is not a fish but a man , dead long enough to belong to someone else's history. Reclusive investigator Rennick Avery takes the call at his kitchen table and finds himself pulled back into a town he never meant to see again. The local sheriff wants the death buried quietly. A federal agent named Linnea Hurst suspects the body is a thread leading somewhere far more dangerous. And Judge Calder Wrenn, whose family has shaped Blackhollow for generations, seems less interested in justice than in silence. As Avery combs through old industries, old feuds, and a half-dozen residents with reasons to lie, the drought keeps tightening its grip. Each clue dredged from the mud brings him closer to a truth the town has spent decades underwater , and someone is watching the reservoir's banks, ready to make sure the next body that surfaces is his. The quarry lights still burn at the edge of town, but whether they are a warning or an invitation is the question Avery must answer before the rain comes back and washes the evidence , and him , away.