Ash County: A Detective Thriller

By Holt Brennan

The town has been quiet for forty years. She's about to find out why.

Carbon Hollow hasn't had a murder in four decades. That was never peace.

Detective Reyna Calder left the dying coal county at eighteen and built a career - and a reputation - two states away. She swore she'd never come back. Then her father's lungs began finishing what the mines started, and she came home to watch him go.

She arrived the same week the county recorded its first killing in forty years. Dale Kessler - the mine company's last landman, the man who spent thirty years buying out, pressuring out, and burying the paperwork of a failing coalfield - turns up at the bottom of a shaft his own company sealed in 1987. He's been dead eleven days. Nobody reported him missing.

Deputized over her own objections, Reyna works a case where every door she knocks on is a homecoming and every alibi is a grievance. The suspect pool is the whole county. And the deeper she digs, the closer she gets to a buried crime that priced her father's silence - and bought her own childhood.

A slow-burn rural noir about the harms that hide inside quiet places. The first book in a new series.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H6Y2XY5P
• ISBN13: 9798184868974
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"