White Smoke Station

By Scott P. Hicks

A passenger train enters the Alaska dark with five cars.
Only two come out.

When a red engine rolls into White Smoke Station without its rear coaches, investigator Cass Mercer is called into a scene no one can explain. The front passengers are alive, shaken, and packed into a warming tent. The tracks behind them are clean. No wreckage. No bodies. No signal. No fire.

Just three missing cars, a wall of white smoke, and a tunnel that should have been empty.

Cass has worked bad scenes before. She knows how disasters leave evidence. Bent metal. Broken glass. Blood. A path. But this place gives her something worse than damage: absence. The mountain seems to have taken the missing passengers whole.

Then the town's systems begin to fail.

Radios fracture into static. Weather reports stop making sense. A strange fog crawls low through the streets. Families are ordered into shelters, officials argue over evacuation, and a powerful corporate contractor wants the site locked down before Cass can understand what happened. Every answer points deeper into a network of sealed infrastructure, buried records, hidden experiments, and old decisions someone has spent years trying to keep frozen.

Cass is not alone. Gabe, a sharp-edged ally with his own scars, helps her follow the evidence into the mountain. Together, they uncover signs that the missing train is only the beginning. Another group is gone. A second list of names waits in the dark. And somewhere beneath White Smoke Station, a machine built to measure pressure may have opened something no one can fully control.

The deeper Cass digs, the clearer the threat becomes:

A vanished train with no crash siteA town trapped between evacuation and containmentA corporate cover-up buried beneath the iceA dangerous phenomenon spreading through fog, sound, and pressureA personal clue tied to someone Cass may not be ready to faceA final choice between sealing the truth away or bringing it into the light

White Smoke Station is a tense, atmospheric thriller about missing people, buried guilt, and the cost of survival when the official story is a lie.

Cass can still save the living.

But the mountain has already learned how to keep the dead quiet.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FMP237GF
• ISBN13: 9798298310888
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 436 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 8.0"