The Doe River Murder

Some secrets are buried. Some are walled in.

Nicole Kirkland hasn't set foot in Lindenville since she was six years old. That was the winter of the great ice storm, when her mother walked out into the night and never came back, and a nineteen-year-old girl who worked on the family farm vanished into the frozen Doe River.

Now, newly divorced and with nowhere else to go, Nicole has inherited her grandmother's 1794 farmhouse on the St. Lawrence border. The cellar is flooding, and the only man who can save the crumbling stone wall is Eli Marchand, the carpenter the whole town has whispered about for twenty-eight years.

Eli is quiet and guarded, and he knows the old house better than he should. Nicole is drawn to him in ways she can't afford, and she can't stop wondering what he's hiding.

Then the wall comes down, and behind it is a sealed brick room that has kept its secret since the night of the storm.

As the past cracks open and another ice storm bears down on the North Country, Nicole must decide who to trust: the man everyone warned her about, or the people who've been kind to her all along.

Because whoever bricked up that wall never left Lindenville.