Digging Up Bones: The Story of a Tragic Romance

It's December 1949, and the holidays have descended upon a small, rural town. But not all is cheerful.

Sheriff Gordon Maxwell, emotionally broken, with an affinity for the drink, wakes up in the hospital-nose broken and jaw wired shut. Memory returns like a fog, as his deputy explains that the teenage boy he'd saved from an abusive father is in a coma down the hall.

And then he hears that two children have been abducted, which triggers flashbacks in Maxwell's mind that resurface suppressed childhood horrors.

Maxwell's investigation into the missing children digs up a secret society within the Catholic Church- the Fundamental Legionnaires of the Cristo, which has morphed to include nondenominational pedophiles and other sickos making a fortune from child trafficking.

When his deputy mysteriously disappears, Maxwell realizes he must face this evil underground, as well as his worsening visions, alone. The two worlds converge at a seminary, where he once studied, and where he must dig up something buried in the far reaches of his mind to finally find the answers he'd been looking for at the bottom of a bottle.

Fans of Dean Koontz, Joe R Landsdale, Andrew Vachss, and Stephen King will appreciate this exploration into the world's hidden evils and the secrets of the human psyche.