Digging Up Bones

by Augustus G. Van Slyke

It’s December 1949, and the holidays have descended upon a small, rural town. But not all is cheerful.

Sheriff Gordon Maxwell, emotionally broken, with an affinity for the drink, wakes up in the hospital—nose broken and jaw wired shut. Memory returns like a fog, as his deputy explains that the teenage boy he’d saved from an abusive father is in a coma down the hall.

And then he hears that two children have been abducted, which triggers flashbacks in Maxwell’s mind that resurface suppressed childhood horrors.

Maxwell’s investigation into the missing children digs up a secret society. The Fundamental Legionnaires of the Cristo, which has morphed to include nondenominational child trafficking agency. Maxwell realizes he must face this evil underground alone. The two worlds converge at a seminary, where he once studied. He must dig up something buried in the far reaches of his mind to find the answers he’d been looking for at the bottom of a bottle. Fans of Dean Koontz, Joe R Landsdale, Andrew Vachss, and Stephen King will appreciate this exploration into the world’s hidden evils and the secrets of the human psyche.

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 2014