The Saint of Unfinished Graves

Rain hammers Hollowmere the night a stranger's body surfaces in the flooded gutter of Grieve and Lampblack, and outsider Iris Vant is the only one asking why. The dead man carries no identification, no story, just a medallion stamped with the face of a saint whose shrine stands half-finished at the edge of town. As Iris digs into Hollowmere's drowned past, she finds a community bound by silence: Eli Garrick, whose family land borders the unfinished grave; his sister Lenna, hiding a lover and a ledger full of debts; Father Bramwell, the young priest assigned to a parish no one wants him to bless; and Marget Hollis, the widow everyone swears cannot be trusted. Old alliances crack when Otis Vrell, the sheriff, refuses to call the death a murder, and when Dorian Ash returns from years away, the questions multiply faster than the bodies. Each answer Iris uncovers pulls her closer to a choice she did not ask to make, expose the saint's secret and shatter the families that built Hollowmere, or walk away and let the unfinished grave swallow one more truth. In a town where the rain never stops and the dead never rest, every kindness hides a motive, and the only way out is the one nobody survives telling.