The Cold Reading (Paperback)

Paperback. The town already knows what took him. It has known for two hundred years. When eleven-year-old Caleb Pruitt walks to the edge of a cursed patch of ground at dusk and never comes home, the town of Halloway, Ohio, reaches for the story it has kept in a drawer since 1798 - a settlement on the hill, a second observance held at night, a ground that asks to be paid. Two hundred volunteers search for days and find nothing. A grieving mother, watching the search wind down to a whiteboard in an empty parking lot, makes a phone call no one advised her to make. James Sutter is a forensic psychologist who takes apart hauntings for a living - a specialist in coercive belief, the author of a book on how grief manufactures certainty. He does not believe in the ground. He believes in the machinery underneath the ground: the human reasons a community would rather have a monster than a mirror. But the family has also brought in Iris Calder, the psychic whose interference nine years ago cost a nineteen-year-old her life and cost Sutter everything he had built - and now the two of them are working the same missing child using their own tools and talents. What Sutter finds in Halloway is a well-liked coach the whole town has quietly decided to suspect. A pharmacist no one will accuse out loud. A priest keeping two centuries of confession behind a locked cabinet. And underneath all of it, a mechanism older and closer and more human than any curse - one that a brilliant, wounded man might walk directly past. A literary folk-horror mystery about grief, guilt, and the comfort of monsters, both supernatural and human. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…