What Calverton Hides: A Stranger in

Calverton, Ohio. Population ten thousand. A quiet town where nothing much ever happens.That's what Cole Cafferty was counting on.After twelve years with the Chicago Police Department - twelve years of drug trafficking, violent crime, and the slow erosion of something inside him - the newly appointed deputy made a choice. He asked for a transfer to the smallest, quietest town he could find. A place to start over.He found Calverton.But on the night of the town's fifty-third annual harvest festival, a local farmer named Norman Briggs walks north into the dark with a man in a black coat - and doesn't come back. By morning, he is found dead on a riverside path. Cause of death: cardiac arrest.Cole doesn't believe it.As he digs deeper, a picture begins to emerge. The Stanton family - the town's oldest and most powerful dynasty - has been quietly accumulating farmland for a hundred and fifty years, shifting boundary lines year by year, generation by generation. Mayor Martin Greaves has been keeping the administrative doors open with campaign funding that flows directly from Stanton-affiliated companies. And a medical examiner from Kenton Falls with ties to a Stanton-backed foundation has signed off on Norman's death.Every time Cole gets close, a wall appears. His investigation is suspended. His sources are compromised. The people who know the most say the least.But Cole has a paramedic who saw something at the scene she can't officially say. A reporter with eight years of files he's never been able to publish. A paralegal who knows more than she's allowed to tell. And a sheriff who has looked the other way for twenty-five years - until a friend turns up dead.In a small town, power runs deep. And some things have been buried for a very long time.What Calverton Hides: A Stranger in Calverton is a taut, character-driven thriller about what happens when an outsider refuses to look away - and the price that comes with seeing too clearly.