The Last Rites of Caldera
In Caldera, Texas, the paperwork is always right. That's the problem.
Daniel Voss wanted a quiet business. The only funeral home in Caldera - eleven miles from the Rio Grande, with a county contract and no competition for sixty miles - looked like a fresh start for a family that badly needed one.
Then the sheriff brings him a body with the forms already signed. Then another. The senator whose ranch runs to the river shakes his hand at the church potluck and offers help with anything. The previous owner died of a heart attack, everyone says, and no one says his name.
What Daniel finds - in a hidden ledger, in the ground behind his own cemetery, in a machine that has been counting for twenty-seven years - is a corridor for people and product that runs straight through his building. And a town where every honest person has been keeping the count alone, in the dark, for a decade: a priest, a deputy, an old embalmer with a daughter to protect, a girl who is the only one getting out.
There is no one to go to. The FBI referral lands on the sheriff's desk in ninety minutes. The law that should protect Daniel is the law that owns the county.
So Daniel decides what the building is going to do.
And on the night everything leaves, he finds a dead man in his wife's car.
The Last Rites of Caldera is a slow-burn literary crime thriller about corruption, complicity, and what it costs to say no when the machine needs you to say yes.
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