Hollow's End
By Lucian Haverly
A sheriff running from his past. A historian guarding his town's darkest secrets. And a killer who wears the face of local legend.
Sheriff Ethan Hayes didn't come to Hollow's End to be a hero. He came to disappear — away from Chicago, away from the partner he failed to save, away from the hollow echo of a gunshot he couldn't take back. Three months in a pumpkin-spiced tourist trap with its manufactured merriment and harvest masks everywhere he looked. Quiet, manageable, forgettable. Then the corn maze gives up its dead, and Ethan realizes some towns bleed the same as cities — they just hide the wound better.
Julian Bishop has spent his life cataloging Hollow's End's shadows: the folklore, the ghost stories, the dark corners that built a community and buried its sins. When the sheriff with haunted eyes and city-worn edges walks into his bookstore asking about legends made flesh, Julian recognizes the weight of a man carrying more than a badge. Their first conversation crackles with friction — outsider instinct versus generational knowledge, urgency versus precision — and neither man walks away unchanged.
When bodies begin staging themselves as local ghost stories, Ethan and Julian are forced into breathless partnership. Each murder peels back another layer of a town built on a seventy-year-old cover-up, where founding families purchased silence with blood money and called it charity. The killer has a list. They're working through it. And the clock marking Halloween midnight is running down faster than either man can outrace.
But the case that keeps pulling them together is also pulling the ground from beneath them both. Every revelation costs something. Every hour of amber lamplight and late-night research dissolves another wall between them — until surviving the investigation stops being the only thing either man is afraid to lose.
A forced-proximity small-town MM romance featuring an outsider cop, a keeper of dark lore, and a Halloween mystery drenched in folklore and buried sins.
