Five Faces At Hollin Cove - The Hollow Carved Faces, #3

HOLLIN COVE, OREGON. Population six hundred. One road in. One Lutheran church. A bluff rising six hundred feet above the Pacific.

On the twelfth of September, a nineteen-year-old girl walks out of a church supper and does not come home.

Forty-seven days later, her mother makes a call to Seattle.

Paige Whitford is a private investigator who works in places the police have already left. She drives three hundred and seventy miles south down Highway 101 in the rain. She is not the first person to look for Eva Halvik. She is the first person Eva's mother has trusted.

What Paige finds in Hollin Cove is older than the missing girl.

A house on a cliff above the cove that no one has entered in thirteen years. A housekeeper who carries one plate of supper from her cottage to the back hallway every Sunday, and brings the plate back empty. A pastor who stopped asking questions in 2014. A reel-to-reel tape from 1971 with a voice that, beneath a low hum at one minute and four seconds, says Paige's full name. A face she has been drawing in her sleep at 3:42 AM for one hundred and forty-three days.

The same face Eva drew in her marine biology notebook, six weeks before she disappeared.

By the end of eleven days, four other girls have names.

Hollin Cove, 1971. Coos Bay, 1986. Astoria, 1995. Gold Beach, 2008.

By the end of eleven days, the cedar pieces in a small box behind a row of salmon jars have been counted, and there is one piece left over.

By the end of eleven days, Paige drives home.

And opens the bottom drawer of her desk in Capitol Hill at 12:57 in the morning, and finds something there that she did not put there.

Five Faces at Hollin Cove is the third novel in The Hollow Carved Faces, Scarlett Knox's thriller series.