Long Since Drowned

"A literary thriller where grief moves like water through every page."

Above the river, the city keeps moving.

But the river doesn't just hide the dead.

It returns them when the city least expects it.

And all the while, some families drown long before the water takes them.

When a young woman's body is pulled from the churning edge of Falls Park, the city calls it another tragedy carried in on the current. But mystery writer Laci O'Neil knows better. Rivers remember patterns. So do killers.

Still reeling from the violence that shattered her search for her missing sisters, Laci arrives in Sioux Falls hoping distance might quiet the ghosts following her home from the Black Hills with recently found, long-lost triplet Willow. Instead of that peacefulness, she finds herself drawn into a new investigation beside handsome Detective Tucker Kingsley, whose calm steadiness masks a city rotting beneath its polished surface.

As more women vanish along the riverbanks, whispers begin circling an abandoned mill out of town, a place tied to broken families, vanished workers, and a sister no one speaks about anymore. The deeper Laci digs, the more the case twists into something intimate and monstrous, forcing her to confront the terrible truth that violence is rarely born in darkness alone. Sometimes it is raised carefully, lovingly, inside the walls of a home.

Haunting, atmospheric, and sharp with emotional tension, Long Since Drowned is a literary thriller about grief, sisterhood, survival, and the secrets small cities bury beneath the sound of rushing water.