Eight Days On A Full Wind

They came for the woman who had been hiding for fourteen years. They took the one standing in her doorway.

Shauna Kesterson clears out the houses of the dead. Eleven years of estate sales and death cleanouts have taught her exactly where frightened people hide things, which is a useful skill and a quiet one, and it has never once put her in danger.

Then two men stop their van on Cedar Street on a Wednesday morning, say a name that isn't hers with absolute certainty, and put her in the back.

They want a clock. A brass mantel clock worth forty dollars, taken out of a dead woman's parlor eight days ago. They have spent thirteen years looking for it, because it is the only thing on earth that can free the man serving life for a murder he did not commit. And Shauna packed it herself, wrapped it in newspaper, taped the seam shut, and loaded it onto a truck.

Ninety yards up the street, a woman sits in a parked car and watches the whole thing happen.

Joan Tarver knows exactly who those men are and exactly what they want, because they came for her. She has spent fourteen years being someone else in a small Missouri town, and she cannot say a word without losing everything. So she puts the car in gear and drives away, and every hour she stays silent, the wrong woman in that room gets closer to being useless.

Six days. Two women working the same trail from opposite ends. One racing to find an object before it is destroyed, the other racing to destroy it first.

And in a stripped bedroom eleven miles outside town, something happens that neither of them planned for: the captive listens to her kidnappers, looks at the evidence, and concludes they are right.

A slow-burn psychological thriller told in alternating perspectives, EIGHT DAYS ON A FULL WIND is about what a life is worth, what a lie costs, and what a person owes a stranger she has already spent.