Phillip Austin Green
Author·Shadows of Emberdale
Emberdale was built on grief. Detective Allen Grey is the last piece it needs.
The Book ↓Author·Shadows of Emberdale
Emberdale was built on grief. Detective Allen Grey is the last piece it needs.
The Book ↓The Book
A grieving detective discovers his city’s foundation magic has been waiting nine years for his grief — and that closing the wards means giving up the last thing he has of his daughter.
For nine years, Detective Allen Grey has been looking for the pattern in his wife’s death. He keeps a brass ruler one and a half centimeters from the edge of his desk, and every morning it has moved. He tells himself he moved it.
When a community center burns and leaves an untouched 1920s classroom in its basement, the carved knots Allen has chased in forty-seven notebooks surface again. The fires bend toward ward-blueprints older than the city. Emberdale was built on a ritual geometry — and the geometry runs on the bound souls of children, fed to it for a hundred and fifty years by the Whitlock family.
The founders left one node deliberately open. It can be closed only by the freely surrendered grief of an outsider. The Whitlocks have been waiting nine years.
Allen’s daughter was not lost to chance.
For readers of Susan Barker’s Old Soul, Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home, and Jaq Evans’s What Grows in the Dark.
The Author
Phillip Austin Green is a U.S. Air Force veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the founder of Free Mind Films, an Oklahoma City documentary studio.
His three feature documentaries — A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995 (Best Documentary, Las Vegas Independent Film Festival), State of Mind: The Psychology of Control, and ShadowRing — examine government corruption and concealed power, and stream on Amazon Prime.
Shadows of Emberdale is his debut novel. He lives in Oklahoma.