The Cold Reading

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.