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.