The Given Ground

For seven years, Sheriff Cassidy Mara dug up what her town buried. This time, they buried something for her.

The worst flood in a generation is tearing Hollister Fork apart - no power, no roads, the whole town scattered to high ground while the river swallows the valley. And when the old mill dam gives way, the water gives up a body: Roy Deel, the man who stood up at a county meeting and called Sheriff Cassidy Mara a menace to her face. Now he's dead. And every piece of evidence points at her.

A note in Deel's hand, naming her. Her boot print in his yard. Her department's paint on his truck. It's clean. It's perfect. It's a frame - and Cassidy knows exactly who built it. For three years she's kept a locked drawer of cases her crooked predecessor closed too fast, every one leading back to the same untouchable man. She's been climbing toward Alden Frey since the winter. Now Frey has decided the sheriff climbing toward him needs to disappear - inside the flood, with her own name on the crime.

Recused, benched, and half a step from a cell, Cassidy has to prove she didn't do it while the water hides everything and the town - cold, ruined, and desperate to believe the outsider was bad all along - turns against her. But a frame is a thing someone built. And the same flood that was meant to bury her is receding now, giving back what it took: a witness, a rigged dam, a thirty-year pattern of people who drowned so one man could own the water.

The ice keeps. The water takes. And what a town buries, the flood carries downstream - to whoever's standing lowest.

The Given Ground is the eighth Hollister Fork mystery - a claustrophobic, slow-burn small-town crime novel about a sheriff framed for murder in a drowning town, and the beloved man who finally came out from behind the wall to destroy her. Perfect for readers of Jane Harper, William Kent Krueger, and S.A. Cosby.

The Hollister Fork Files can be read in any order - but readers who start at the beginning watch the whole town come apart, one buried truth at a time.