By Michael W. Hughes
Some cases don't close. Some just go quiet.
When a missing-child call drags Detective Jack Warner to an abandoned Los Angeles school at 3:11 a.m., he expects a trespasser. What he finds instead are hundreds of drawings-spirals, tunnels, faces-and a single phrase scrawled across the wall: Observation continues.
The case should have ended there.
It doesn't.
The deeper Warner digs, the more he discovers a system designed to erase what it can't explain: children who vanish without a trace, rooms that change overnight, and names that appear in files that shouldn't exist. Joined by Leah Grant, a weary CPS investigator with her own missing time, Jack follows a trail of vanished officers, red notebooks, and recursive memories that refuse to stay buried.
Every spiral leads back to Room 112-and to a truth neither of them were meant to remember.
ACCESS DENIED is a slow-burn psychological thriller that fuses mystery, noir, and speculative horror into a story about memory, loss, and the cost of knowing too much. For fans of True Detective, Blake Crouch's Recursion, and The X-Files, it asks one question:
If you knew the system was rewriting lives-would you still try to remember yours?