Androscoggin After Dark

Four seasons. One river. A year of secrets coming to the surface.

In New Hampshire's North Country, the Androscoggin has always been good at keeping what people give it.

Until the winter a body comes through the ice.

What follows reaches far beyond one death. Old names surface. Women who disappeared become harder to explain away. Records do not match the stories people have been telling for years, and places everyone thought they understood begin to look different once someone starts asking the right questions.

The snow melts, the roads soften, summer engines tear through the woods, and by fall fire is burning across black water. Through every season, the same truth keeps pushing its way forward. Someone counted on distance, silence, fear, and time to bury what happened here.

They did not count on the people who would refuse to leave it buried.

At the heart of the River Series are four women whose lives become tangled with the secrets running beneath their towns. Maura Vale never learned how to look away. Sienna Lavoie knows what it means to live with unanswered questions. Claire Caron follows evidence into places most people would rather avoid. Carrie Walsh understands that sometimes the smallest detail is the one that breaks everything open.

Their stories unfold among deputies, first responders, investigators, families, neighbors, old motel rooms, back roads, culverts, ATV trails, riverbanks, and the deep woods of northern New Hampshire. There is danger here, but there is also love, loyalty, stubbornness, dark humor, and the kind of people who show up when it matters.

Androscoggin After Dark: The River Series Omnibus

brings together the complete four-book series in one newly edited volume:

When the River Freezes

When the River Thaws

When the River Runs

When the River Burns

This omnibus also includes the final series epilogue,

Something That Held, bringing the River Series full circle and giving its characters the ending they earned.

For readers who love atmospheric romantic suspense, interconnected mysteries, strong women, slow-burn relationships, small-town secrets, and crime fiction rooted deeply in place.

Small towns keep secrets. Rivers keep the rest.

Erica R. Buteau is a New Hampshire author, historian, and independent publisher whose work is rooted in the people, landscapes, resilience, and complicated histories of northern New England. From her home in Milan, she writes atmospheric North Country fiction, accessible nonfiction, true crime history, memoir, and practical guides designed to help readers feel informed, understood, and less alone.Her fiction blends small-town secrets, crime, romance, family history, and a strong sense of place. She is the author of the Androscoggin After Dark series, a collection of dark romantic suspense stories set along the river towns and backroads of New Hampshire's North Country, as well as related novels and spinoffs that explore the people, mysteries, and buried histories of the region. Her nonfiction draws on research, lived experience, and a lifelong interest in the ways ordinary people survive extraordinary circumstances.Erica holds a master's degree in public history, a bachelor's degree in criminal justice, and an associate degree in liberal arts. She is also a New Hampshire Emergency Medical Responder, homesteader, researcher, data analyst, and the founder of Stearns Brook Press, an independent publishing imprint dedicated to compelling stories, useful books, and voices grounded in real places and real lives.She lives with her husband, Rick, at Legacy Acres at Stearns Brook Farm, where everyday life includes poultry, gardens, honey, a roadside farm stand, an ever-growing collection of projects, and the beautiful disorder of building something meaningful from the ground up. Her experiences in public history, emergency response, rural life, entrepreneurship, grief work, and community service shape both the questions she asks and the characters she creates.Across genres, her aim remains the same: to create books with heart, substance, atmosphere, and purpose.Whether she is writing about a river that keeps secrets, a historical crime nearly lost to time, or the practical realities of navigating a difficult season, Erica approaches every book with curiosity, compassion, honesty, and respect for the reader. Her work reflects a central belief: stories can entertain us, preserve what might otherwise disappear, and remind us that survival is rarely simple, but it is always worth examining.