EAST END OR NOWHERE

Kate Hensley carves headstones in Harlow, North Carolina. One Monday in September, five orders arrive in the mail for men who are still alive: a car dealer running for the state senate, the county sheriff, the owner of the granite quarry, the man who pumps gas on the bypass, and the pastor of the biggest church in the county. Every order is paid in full, in cash, at 1996 prices. Every order already has a death date filled in, one for each Friday in October. And every order carries the same line at the bottom: SHE WAS SEVENTEEN.

Everybody in Harlow knows what that means. On the Fourth of July in 1996, those five boys were at the flooded quarry the town calls the Pit when a seventeen-year-old lifeguard named Carrie Lowe went into the black water and never came up. Carrie was the one who taught every child in town the rule for jumping off the ledge there: east end, or nowhere. The sheriff called it a bad dive onto a hidden rock. The town has told it that way for thirty years.

Kate’s father, Roy, is the rescue captain who brought Carrie up. Now he has dementia, and he keeps saying things nobody wants to hear. Four of those boys were wet, he says. One of them was dry.

On the first Friday, the car dealer dies in his sleep. By morning, his headstone is standing on the quarry ledge, cut in Kate’s family lettering and carrying Roy’s fingerprints. The county starts looking hard at a confused old man and at Carrie’s dying mother. Kate knows her father didn’t set that stone. Somebody who learned the trade in his shop did, and that somebody has kept one secret for thirty years and will kill to keep it.

Luke Lowe is a sheriff’s investigator. Carrie was his big sister. His own daughter is about to turn seventeen. And the first real evidence he finds points straight at his mother.

Four Fridays are left. Then a sixth order arrives, and this one has Roy Hensley’s name on it.

EAST END OR NOWHERE is a small-town Southern thriller about grief, a buried lie, and the people who want the truth no matter the cost.