SOME SECRETS WON’T STAY BURIED WITH THE DEAD.
NOT EVEN UNDER A MOUNTAIN.
After 2 decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to the mountains to face his past.
Will and his best friend, Lloyd, were the only 2 survivors…
…of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 coal mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit small town of Aintree Hollow. But the 2 young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried secrets about another tragedy that occurred deep in the guts of the mountains after the explosion. Those secrets decimate the next 2 decades of their lives.
Will returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster–determined to confess what he did. The mountains are just as he left them; the people who live there are not.
Granny Sparrow’s grief has imprisoned her.
JoJo bears the invisible stamp of a family heritage that will kill her.
Jamey is … is what? How can Will explain the boy’s psychic ability? The magical statues he carves out of lumps of coal?
And Lloyd wants to kill him.
Will doesn’t realize that his arrival has unleashed powerful forces that will endanger the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain. Only this time, the explosion that kills them won’t be an accident. This time, it will be murder.
Will doesn’t see the mounting danger, though. Or that Jamey and his pet mine canary, ValVleen, hold the key to it all.
When the unthinkable happens and the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked 2 decades ago? Is Will man enough now to save them–even if it means he must face the horror he’s been running away from all these years?
Will he leave the miners behind, buried alive?
Or will he die with them, gasping for breath in the dark until there’s no air left?