Ghost Hauler

Some men collect miles. Some men collect ghosts.

Stephen Van Olsen collects teeth.

Ghost Hauler: Fifty Teeth is the fictional confession of a long-haul truck driver and serial killer, told entirely in his own voice. Spanning nearly three decades and crisscrossing the American interstate system, each chapter is built around a single victim: identified only by name, location, and date, and the tooth Van Olsen extracts as a souvenir.

Van Olsen is not a monster who hides behind charm. He is methodical, self-aware, and unsettlingly articulate. Raised on a failed Kansas wheat farm by a violent father and a church pianist mother, he inherited a .38 revolver with a single round still in the chamber and a hatred for unfinished business. The road gave him everything else: anonymity, movement, and an endless supply of people no one would slow down for.

The kills are not gratuitous. Van Olsen selects them the way he selects the teeth: with care, with purpose, and with the understanding that you, the reader, came here to look. He knows why you opened the page. He is not going to let you pretend otherwise.

As the body count climbs, so does the pressure. An FBI agent named Mara Holt begins connecting cases across state lines. A fellow trucker named Larry gets too close. And the voices Van Olsen calls the Choir, the accumulated dead who ride with him in the cab, grow louder with every mile.

Ghost Hauler: Fifty Teeth is a psychological crime novel by Stephen Van Olsen, author of The Hunter's Craft. Spare, declarative, relentlessly paced. For readers who want to sit in the cab with the wrong kind of driver.