The Ghost

Detective Roese looked up, lank hair hanging across her face. Blood staining her bare hands and forearms, she pressed down on the sucking chest wound, fighting to prevent another tally on the list of the recently deceased.

“You can’t go out there. Best case, you never find him in the middle of all this. Worst, it’s a trap.”

Outcomes Reed had already considered and dismissed, his faith placed in the inky black K-9 partner by his side. “Even a ghost leaves a scent.”

Months into the new hybrid role created for Detective Reed Mattox and his K-9 partner Billie, things have returned to some semblance of normalcy. A summer spent on the graveyard shift out of the 8th Precinct with the Columbus Police Department, with only the occasional side job for the state Bureau of Criminal Investigations. A stretch allowing them to put the chaos of the spring behind them and largely avoid the governor who selected them.

Their moment of peace ends abruptly with a call to the small town of Piketon in the middle of the night. A request for outside presence to oversee the investigation into the sudden death of seventeen-year-old Bridger Van Cott. The star quarterback was found dead behind the wheel of his Trans Am six days before the season opener, the vehicle festooned in the colors of the team’s rival.

For a community still reeling from a tragedy of national proportions just a few years prior, the newest incident has the potential to become volatile. Reed and Billie’s first task is to tamp the simmering tensions and avoid a collision between neighboring communities.

Their second, to determine what happened to the young man already awarded a full scholarship to play major college football next year. Someone with no known enemies or medical conditions and a crime scene with no signs of a break-in or struggle.

A murder so perfect, it was almost as if it was committed by…a ghost.

© 2026 Dustin Stevens (Audiobook): 9780466744984

Release date

Audiobook: 15 October 2026