The Last Face She Would Draw

At 3:42 a.m., Paige Whitford wakes with a stranger's face beneath her pencil. Within days, that stranger is dead.

She used to tell herself she was only drawing what was already coming. She is no longer sure she isn't the reason it comes.

Paige reads the truth in sound for a living, a forensic analyst who can pull a lie out of a recording. But since her sister's murder cracked something open in her, her hands have begun their own work in the dark, sketching the faces of the soon-to-die with their eyes closed, strangers whose names she only learns from the obituaries. The drawings are never wrong. And lately the closed eyes have started, very slightly, to open.

Desperate to understand what she has become, Paige follows a trail of small carved wooden faces and her dead grandmother's hidden recordings to a shuttered church camp on a fog-bound coast, where a kind old caretaker has guarded a secret half a century old, and where the man who killed her sister is hunting the same tapes. The closer she comes to the answer, the more the gift turns inward, toward the few people she has left. Because the last face it ever learns to draw is the one she would die before marking.

And she is beginning to recognize them.

She wanted to know what she was. She is about to find out the worst way there is, one familiar face at a time.

The Last Face She Would Draw is the fifth book in the supernatural psychological thriller series The Hollow Carved Faces: an atmospheric, slow-burn descent into family secrets, buried sins, and the price of a gift no one asked for.