The Hollow Lantern: Book One: Haunting

Four friends went looking for open road. They found a town that would not let them leave.Owen, Claire, Raj, and Maya only wanted a few days away from Caltech: desert air, old roads, camera gear, radio equipment, and the freedom to be young without a schedule. When Owen's battered Tacoma breaks down near a shuttered mining attraction called Jefferson, the abandoned town seems like the most practical place to find shelter, tools, and a way back to the road.At first, Jefferson offers ordinary dangers: heat, unstable buildings, dead batteries, and the slow pressure of isolation. Then a chair moves in an empty saloon. Footsteps cross the hotel above them. A child's presence answers careful questions. A repeated card game breaks its own pattern. By the time the truck is running again, the road has learned how to bring them back.Jefferson's dead are not mindless echoes. They are citizens, witnesses, gossips, cowards, children, and old enemies, still trapped inside the stories the town chose to believe. The strongest story says Sheriff Thomas Calloway lost his nerve, abandoned his daughter, and fled into the desert. Abby Calloway has spent more than a century insisting that is a lie.To earn their way out, the four must do more than survive a haunting. They must decide what can be proven, what must be left unclaimed, and what the living owe the dead once a false history begins to break.The Hollow Lantern: Book One: The Haunting is a slow-burn supernatural mystery about friendship, evidence, grief, and an abandoned Western town where escape is only the first test.