Messenger Out of Time

Secrets of an ancient bog surface as Ria explores hidden artifacts and a sudden disappearance…

During the annual Halloween festival in Shokan Falls, Ria Quinn discovers a prehistoric peat bog on the outskirts of town. It lies near an abandoned state hospital that was originally built as an insane asylum.

As an amateur archaeologist exploring artifacts in Britain, Ria had come across unstable bogs before, places where ancient bodies lay hidden beneath. She just has to check this one out. Only, when she takes a few careful steps across it, the body of a woman surfaces, one Ria knows has not spent millennia in such a watery grave.

Soon after, remarkable footage shows up in an old film she is given, suggesting the insane asylum may have been built over a Neolithic village, though this is in wild dispute.

Ria is pulled into a mystery that inextricably links the woman in the bog to the asylum and to a Native American legend drawn out of the landscape of the Hudson River Valley. Despite the wishes (and orders) of local Sheriff Gareth Matheson and resistance from the mayor of Shokan Falls, she cannot help but investigate it all, with her golden retriever Hailey at her side.

And when the mayor is found dead inside the ruins of the asylum, Ria must discover the truth about a secret held in silence for too long.