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Skinbound
A disgraced podcaster is hunting for a comeback. A new serial killer is hunting for a collaborator.
Two years after her breakout true crime podcast Forgotten implodes around a single catastrophic lie, Mara Evans is radioactive. Sponsors gone, reputation destroyed, she drives the back roads of the American desert chasing missing people no one else will cover, desperate for one story that might save her career.
At a dead quiet Nevada gas station at three in the morning, she finds it.
A crudely stitched teddy bear sits by a fuel pump. The seams are wrong. The toy is warm. It smells of formaldehyde. Under UV light, a message appears, tailored to her. The bear is made of human skin. The discovery is not an accident. It is an invitation.
The creator calls himself The Preservationist. He hunts the unmissed and the invisible, then “reformats” them into skin bound effigies and installations left in the liminal corners of the West. He knows Mara’s work, her methods, her failure. He has been listening. He has been editing.
What starts as a hunt for a killer becomes a psychological duel. The Preservationist begins to rewrite Mara’s old episodes, turns her own narration against her, and delivers a biography of her childhood bound in the skin of a man she once knew. Then a blank volume arrives at her door. Human leather. Her name on the cover.
He does not want to kill her. He wants a partner.
Skinbound is a dark, psychological cat and mouse thriller about a storyteller caught inside someone else’s artwork, where every clue is a curated atrocity and every episode may be her last. If you like relentless mind games, serial killers who treat murder as narrative, and protagonists forced to choose between their ethics and their obsession, Skinbound will pull you page by page to the final cut.
Two years after her breakout true crime podcast Forgotten implodes around a single catastrophic lie, Mara Evans is radioactive. Sponsors gone, reputation destroyed, she drives the back roads of the American desert chasing missing people no one else will cover, desperate for one story that might save her career.
At a dead quiet Nevada gas station at three in the morning, she finds it.
A crudely stitched teddy bear sits by a fuel pump. The seams are wrong. The toy is warm. It smells of formaldehyde. Under UV light, a message appears, tailored to her. The bear is made of human skin. The discovery is not an accident. It is an invitation.
The creator calls himself The Preservationist. He hunts the unmissed and the invisible, then “reformats” them into skin bound effigies and installations left in the liminal corners of the West. He knows Mara’s work, her methods, her failure. He has been listening. He has been editing.
What starts as a hunt for a killer becomes a psychological duel. The Preservationist begins to rewrite Mara’s old episodes, turns her own narration against her, and delivers a biography of her childhood bound in the skin of a man she once knew. Then a blank volume arrives at her door. Human leather. Her name on the cover.
He does not want to kill her. He wants a partner.
Skinbound is a dark, psychological cat and mouse thriller about a storyteller caught inside someone else’s artwork, where every clue is a curated atrocity and every episode may be her last. If you like relentless mind games, serial killers who treat murder as narrative, and protagonists forced to choose between their ethics and their obsession, Skinbound will pull you page by page to the final cut.
407 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 15, 2025
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