Eden Voss prices dying motels for a living. Forty-one, early on purpose, she returns to Hollow Beach only to sell her brother's boarded-up U on the coast and leave again.

Room 4 is supposed to be empty. The Christmas key turns—and the latch is already off. The lamp she once left for a cartographer is burning. Maps cover the table: not Trish Bell's careful north, but a third hand that has hashed this room and written Thursday in the margin.

Hollow Beach files drownings as weather and paints over its population. Deputy Nia Prado wants a crime. Eden wants one night in a bed that isn't a trap. Between a missing office key, a paper V taped over a broken vacancy sign, and a town that still radios every sister's name, she has to decide whether selling the motel means walking away from the maps—or finally reading them.

Hollow Beach, Book 1. Start here. Later books deepen the town's pattern; this one stands alone.

Psychological mystery. Oregon coast. Women who refuse to be filed.