The Magnolia Gallows

In the piney woods of 1923 East Texas, Sheriff Avery O'Rourke is called to a killing that looks like a lynching but hides something stranger and far more personal. With the town doctor dead and mutilated beneath a magnolia tree, Avery turns to Garland Sands, a newly returned veterinarian carrying his own wounds from war, exile, and lost love. What begins as an uneasy investigation becomes a dangerous partnership as another body appears, secrets surface, and the killer's pattern grows more intimate.

Against a backdrop of Prohibition, fear, small-town suspicion, and the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, Avery and Garland must confront not only a murderer but the truths they have spent their lives burying. The closer they come to justice, the harder it becomes to deny the forbidden bond growing between them—a bond that may be the one thing strong enough to survive the darkness closing in around Timberland.