The Saint of Pale Orchard

In Pale Orchard, the dead don't announce themselves. They leave footprints.At 6:14 on a Tuesday morning, Corra Thatch finds her own bare footprint in a drift of spilled flour - heel, arch, ball, five toes, the crooked second toe she broke as a girl.Corra has not had feet in twelve years.The prints cross her locked kitchen and lead through the sleeping town to a freshly dug grave in the church cemetery - her name on the stone, tomorrow's date on the marker.Pale Orchard has always called Corra its living saint. Its miracle. The woman who survived Route 9 and raised the child God sent her. The town has built its kindness around her silence.The Saint of Pale Orchard is a Southern Gothic mystery about a wheelchair-bound woman who cannot walk and cannot stop following the trail - through forged records, a cassette tape no one was meant to hear, a reverend without mercy, and a community that confused silence with grace.Some towns build their saints out of what they buried.Corra intends to find out what Pale Orchard buried - and whose child is living with it.A haunting small-town mystery - atmospheric, precise, and quietly devastating. For readers who want their secrets unearthed slowly, their endings earned, and their protagonists impossible to put down.