First, he saved lives. Now, he hides them.
In the dying town of Millwood Hollow, Michael Graves is a man of quiet routine. A disgraced trauma surgeon turned cemetery caretaker, he tends to the grounds with the same meticulous precision he once used in the operating theater. The locals pity him as a broken man seeking penance, but Michael has found a new, darker purpose.
He calls himself a guardian of the invisible—the drifters, the runaways, the broken souls that society has thrown away. He offers them a permanent peace, burying them nine feet deep in the red clay, exactly three feet beneath the empty graves awaiting the town’s legitimate dead. It is the perfect system: a crime hidden by a funeral, a secret sealed by six feet of earth and a heavy oak casket.
But perfection breeds arrogance.
When Michael breaks his own code and takes a victim who isn’t invisible—a girl with a name, a history, and a sister who won’t stop looking—his carefully constructed sanctuary begins to crack.
Enter Lena Vasquez, a tenacious State Investigator haunted by her own missing person case. She doesn’t believe in coincidences, and she senses a rot beneath the manicured lawns of Millwood Hollow. As Lena circles closer, armed with nothing but intuition and a few jagged inconsistencies, Michael is forced to engage in a terrifying game of cat and mouse.
With the ground settling and the secrets of the soil threatening to rise, the surgeon must perform one final, desperate operation to keep his world from collapsing.
Some secrets are buried deep. Others need to be dug up.