Twenty-Two Winters

Wes Toller comes home on a Tuesday bus, twenty-two years after Hollister Fork sent him to prison for a murder he didn't commit.

The Montana smelter town that convicted him has spent two decades getting smaller and quieter, learning to live with the story it told itself in 2003: that a nineteen-year-old killed his girlfriend by the river, and justice was done.

Sheriff Cassidy Mara wasn't here then. She married into this town, buried a husband in it, and inherited its closed cases without ever choosing them. Now the DNA that freed Wes has handed her a different question - not whether he's innocent, but who in Hollister Fork has been guilty all along, and what the town agreed not to see.

The deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that Linnea Vance didn't die for who she loved. She died for what she saw. And the man who has carried the truth for twenty-two years came home not to clear his name - but to find out whether the silence was worth it.

A story about a town, a river, and the long arithmetic of what we bury. For readers of Rebecca Makkai, William Kent Krueger, and Chris Whitaker.

The first book in the Hollister Fork Files.