The Sealed Year

When Raven Creek digs up its time capsule for the town's 150th birthday, the celebration curdles the instant the mayor reads the line on a plain, mismatched envelope: Open only when the ground is dug up. Inside - a class photo with one child's face inked out, a bank passbook drained to zero, and an index card headed THE SEALED YEAR, listing nine names.

Sheriff's investigator Cole Taggart has learned not to ignore the feeling at the back of his neck. The nine-year-old girl who sealed that envelope in 1975 has been waiting fifty years for someone to find it - because the boy the town says "moved to Ohio" never left at all. He's four feet under the very ground where the anniversary pavilion is about to rise.

But the deeper Cole digs, the clearer it becomes that a fifty-year-old grave still has living guardians. Microfilm vanishes the week the capsule opens. A ninety-year-old witness is frightened silent. And the most powerful man in Raven Creek would much prefer the sheriff accept the town's gratitude and stop digging - because some fortunes are built on what stays in the dark.

As true-crime podcaster Abby Reyes traces the six easy words a whole town agreed to repeat for half a century, Cole closes on a truth with two crimes stacked on one child: the hot, human tragedy that put a boy in the ground - and the cold arithmetic that has profited from keeping him there ever since.

The Sealed Year is the ninth Raven Creek Files novel - a small-town crime thriller about the difference between a thing hidden to be lost and a thing hidden to be found.