Overburden
When Forest Service ranger Addie Wilson finds a fresh hole hand-dug into the slope of Mount Shasta, the method matches a real unsolved case from years earlier: pulley system, missing dirt, no suspect ever found. It should be routine. It isn't.
The parcel bordering the dig belongs to the Halloran-Crane Geological Foundation, a well-loved local nonprofit - and the same place her father worked for eleven years before he died of something his doctors never fully explained.
What Addie uncovers is a private research operation that has quietly extracted an anomalous material from beneath the mountain for seventy years, funded by an endowment no one has ever audited too closely. The substance doesn't just poison. At low exposure, over years, it alters what people perceive - which means every vanished hiker, every reported vision, every piece of Mount Shasta's mystic folklore may be the symptom of a slow-motion contamination one woman has spent four decades protecting.
With her K9 partner Nico, a tribal historic preservation officer carrying two generations of uncatalogued family data, and a supervisor who finally stops looking the other way, Addie builds a case no one wants to be true - including, possibly, the operation's own director, who may be the first person in seventy years honest enough to ask whether her father was ever right at all.
Inspired by a real, still-unsolved mystery on Mount Shasta, OVERBURDEN is a slow-burn literary thriller about institutional silence, inherited guilt, and what it costs to finally tell the truth - even when the system built to hear it isn't built to move fast enough to matter.
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