Shadows in the Orchard

Willow Creek keeps its secrets the way it keeps its root cellars: cool, dark, and just out of sight.

Sarah Carter believes in two things: her coffee and her own two eyes. As the local paper's resident myth-buster, she's built her whole reputation on pulling the sheet off every ghost the town ever dreamed up. So when a reclusive old man vanishes from his cottage, leaving behind an overturned chair, a cold cup of tea, and a single muddy bootprint that isn't his, she's certain there's a rational explanation.

Then a sixteen-year-old girl disappears on a four-street walk home. Then the man who runs the hardware store. Three people gone in a single week, in a town whose biggest crime was a stolen wheelbarrow. The whispers say it's the Shadow Man, the figure the old-timers swear has haunted the orchard for two hundred years. Sarah says it's something with hands, a van, and a reason.

As the vanishings multiply and a stranger begins texting her from a phone with no name, Sarah is pulled deeper into the orchard's dark, down a trail that will cost her far more than a story, and force her to face the one question a myth-buster was never meant to answer: what if some shadows are real?

Atmospheric, propulsive, and impossible to put down, Shadows in the Orchard is a small-town mystery about the monsters that hide in plain sight, and about the way a good ghost story lets an entire town look away from the ones who need watching most.

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