the Sallow County Files: A Fictional Casebook of Seven Invented Cases from Verity Falls Archive

Seven case files. One county that never existed. Every word of it invented. Marian Ashby spent thirty-one years as a records clerk in the Sallow County clerk's office at Verity Falls, filing the paper a small river-and-mill county generates around its dead: shift logs, phone records, property inventories, statements taken at kitchen tables. She retired in the spring of 1996 and did the one thing nobody in that office ever had time to do. She read the files twice. The Sallow County Files collects seven of them, spanning the winter of 1978 to the year she retired. A millwright walks home from the night shift and does not arrive. A newspaper stringer photographs the same mile marker for fifteen years. A man confesses to something he could not have done, and a court believes him. Each file is assembled the way the county assembled it: a timeline table, a witness statement in that witness's own register, an evidence exhibit reproduced on the page. The fact that breaks each case sits in those documents before Ashby names it, and a careful reader can catch it first. Three of the seven were closed by a court. Two were never closed. One was closed wrong, and Ashby shows you the page that proves it. The seventh is hers, and it is still open. This is fiction written in the shape of an archive. There is no true crime in it, no real victim, no real town, and nothing to look up. What it offers instead is the pleasure of the documents themselves, and Ashby's rule, which is also the book's: she says nothing she cannot point to on a page, and where the file is silent she tells you it is silent. For readers of epistolary crime, cold-case mystery and mock-documentary fiction who would rather be handed the evidence than the verdict. Volume One of The Sallow County Files.