Seven Serpents

1985.

Private investigator Jim Masters has seen his share of strange clients, but few arrive before breakfast dressed like a prophet and asking him to recover a missing coin. 

The coin belongs to the Seven Serpents, a notorious local group whose members abandoned ordinary lives for ritual names, elaborate beliefs, and a reputation for making everyone in town uncomfortable. They insist the coin is priceless, irreplaceable, and stolen from a private vault.

Jim expects eccentricity, internal feuding, and maybe an easy paycheck.

 Then one of his leads turns up dead.

 What begins as a search for a strange heirloom soon drags Jim through antique shops, old grudges, buried histories, and the increasingly unsettling world of the Seven Serpents. The deeper he digs, the less the missing coin looks like the real mystery, and the more he begins to suspect that his involvement in the case was never accidental.

 Haunted by his own failures and armed with little more than cigarettes, cheap liquor, a battered Buick, a contemptuous cat, and the instincts of a former cop, Jim must uncover what the Seven Serpents truly want before their obsession becomes Graceful Falls' next tragedy.

 Some mysteries are meant to be solved. Others are waiting for the right witness.