He is sullen and secretive. A hot head who aimed his gun and executed a teenage bully who, by all accounts, was innocent and unarmed.
Detective Andrew Gavin is in a world of trouble: filthy rumors are polluting his reputation and shattering anything that’s left of his law enforcement career. A possible murder charge swings over his neck like a scythe.
And that’s not the worst of it. All this current turbulence has churned up a delusion Andrew believed was long-buried. The Dead Boy, a sewer-made menace of shadows, has tormented Andrew ever since he was a kid facing his first trauma: the gruesome suicide of his ‘frenemy’, Patrick King, upon a mountain trail long ago.
Except…is The Dead Boy a delusion? Andrew awakens battered and beaten whenever he dreams of the thing. He blacks out when The Dead Boy attacks him—only to come to with busted blood vessels in his eyes and a ring of bruises around his neck. “Tell the truth!” the thing snarls, but Andrew just cannot spill all his secrets from way back then. They’re buried too deep.
And…they’re dirty.
Besides, Elizabeth McBrien is back in Jasper now too, and maybe—just maybe—she’ll forgive him. Give him a chance to resurrect the deep friendship they once shared before he murdered it, deliberately, cruelly, and publicly. One more trauma from long ago.
But if that’s the case, there’s no way he can disclose all his secrets. Elizabeth—hell no one—would ever understand.
Still, The Dead Boy says if he stays quiet, Kyle King, a kid Elizabeth loves, will die. And not only that, but the thing is doing its level best to kill Andrew too.
And, in his darkest moments, Andrew longs to just let it…
I first ‘met’ Andrew Gavin when I wrote his sister’s story, Divinity & The Python, and he was a cop who made me curious: why was he so unnerved in his sister’s old morgue? His story formed itself before the edits for Divinity & the Python were even completed for my editor, and I recall scratching out scenes for Andrew’s story (which originally was called Breaking Hymn, a play on words; hymn/him) on scraps of paper while I was feverishly trying to meet my D&P deadline! Andrew is stoic, sullen, yet an extremely good-looking guy—and to me, handsome Brian Van Holt has always been my physical model for my tortured cop, (who is the only character to share my birthday; that’s right: Andrew Gavin is a dark-hearted Scorpio. To the core). Meet Andrew in Within The Summit's Shadow, paperback HERE, kindle ebook HERE and fall in love with his story.