GLENFEAGH

A crate arrives on Seamus O'Caiside's doorstep with no return address — just his surname, in handwriting nobody living should still use. Inside: a vintage ventriloquist dummy, applewood and glass-eyed, grinning at nothing. His wife loves it immediately. That's the last easy thing that happens to either of them. Twenty-eight minutes later, Laoise is dead in her own armchair, hands folded like a woman waiting for church, her tongue gone. The apartment is locked from the inside. There is no one else in the building. There is only the doll, dry as bone, sitting exactly where she left him. Seamus buries his wife and runs — not from the police who think he did it, but toward the one place he swore he'd never go back to: Glenfeagh, the gray coastal town where his family has quietly buried its dead for eighty years without ever asking why the graves kept filling. What he finds there is a woman who was murdered for a nine-year-old's joke, a mob that cut out her tongue to silence a gift they never understood, and a debt that's been collecting interest ever since — one throat, one generation, one perfect wooden child at a time. She's been waiting for him a long time. She's very good at waiting. GLENFEAGH is a novella about the debts a hometown never lets you forget — and the very particular, very patient way it collects.