The Dead Don’t Answer

Boulder Creek, California, 1885. The railroad has reached the upper San Lorenzo Valley. The mills run day and night, and the town is raw and loud.

Constable Asa Merritt wants a quiet year and a second term. When a flume walker is found dead at the pond gate, Merritt sees a square-edged wound behind the left ear. He keeps quiet, and the death goes down as an accident.

Then a bark peeler turns up in the Harmon pond, and a laundress after him. Each body carries the same wound. Each victim has lost a paper with a name on it.

The town already knows who it wants to hang. Merritt is certain he knows better. He is wrong.

Over the mountain, Wing Sun works the same killings alone. Six years ago he survived a tunnel explosion that killed thirty-two men of his crew. The railroad recorded them as a number. Wing Sun wrote down their names. When the old man who reads those names each night is murdered at the graves, Wing Sun begins to count.

Rooted in the real history of the Santa Cruz Mountains, The Dead Don’t Answer is a chilling novel about a town deciding which of its dead count.