Tyler Knox

The Stonebridge quarry closed in 1987, the same year the last of the underground tunnels collapsed and the company that owned it declared bankruptcy and disappeared into a corporate restructuring that no one in town could follow. For most of Pike's life, the quarry has been a scar on the landscape—a terraced wound in the Appalachian hillside, visible from the ridge above town, surrounded by rusted fencing and generations of NO TRESPASSING signs that teenagers ignored and the county never had money to replace. Now Trent Extraction Group is reopening it. Aaron Pike has been a deputy sheriff in Stonebridge County for fifteen years. He grew up here. His father worked the quarry before it closed. He knows the town's shape—its economy, its memory, the things people talk about and the things they don't. When the call comes in at 7:04 a.m. that Jake Rollins, the night foreman at the reopened quarry, missed his 2 a.m. check-in and his truck is still in the lot, Pike assumes it's a wellness check that will resolve itself by noon. It doesn't resolve itself. Jake Rollins was standing on the lower blasting terrace at two in the morning when he found something in the rock—a crack in the blast face that shouldn't have been there, a void behind the wall, a draft from somewhere that shouldn't exist. He photographed it. He radioed it in. And then his flashlight was gone from his hand—not dropped, taken—and the dark came down absolute. *Stonebridge Hollow* is Appalachian noir about a town built on extraction and the buried truths that extraction eventually reveals. It follows Pike as he investigates Rollins's disappearance and discovers that the quarry was closed for reasons that were never made public—reasons connected to missing workers, altered records, and a corporate decision in 1987 to bury what the tunnels had revealed rather than face what it would cost to account for it. The novel unfolds across three acts: the disappearance, the investigation into what the quarry holds, and