Hell to the Bone

Franklin County, Tennessee. 1937.

Adin Jane Austen owns the boutique in Cumberland Heights. She hears everything — gossip, confessions, the careful lies respectable people tell to keep trouble out of sight.

When Detective Nicolo Toscani shows up in her shop looking for coffee and conversation with a pretty lady, she hears that too.

He's working a missing person case. A local young man — brilliant, gentle, not the type to vanish without a word — is gone. It doesn't feel right to Toscani. It doesn't feel like anything the town has noticed yet either.

Adin Jane gets him talking. Over coffee. Over dinner. The way she gets everyone talking. And somewhere in the middle of it, she mentions her brother-in-law John — because John is a weasel, has always been a weasel, and somebody ought to say it out loud.

Toscani listens differently than she expects.

What begins as one missing young man in a town that hasn't noticed anything wrong becomes something that reaches back twenty years and across the Southeast — buried crimes and a darkness nobody in Cumberland Heights has thought to look for.

Hell to the Bone is Southern Appalachian noir about evil wearing respectability like a second skin — and a woman who saw through one man's mask without knowing how right she was.

Some towns don't bury their sins. They build on top of them.