An Inventory Of Closed Eyes

Some faces are carved before the dying begins.When Lily Whitford is pulled from the cold water of a Seattle marina, the police call it an accident. Her sister does not. Paige Whitford has spent fifteen years reading what people leave behind: the catch in a recorded voice, the angle of a wound, the knot a careful woman would never have tied. Everything about Lily’s death is wrong, and Paige can prove it.What she cannot explain is the small carved face that appears in her desk drawer the morning after the funeral. Cedar. Hand-sized. Eyes closed. Her sister’s face, made by someone who could not have known she was going to die.It is not the first.Decades of her grandmother’s field recordings hold a sound beneath the voices, a low hum no machine should capture and no one but Paige can hear. In notebooks left by women up and down the Pacific Northwest coast, the same entry repeats across forty years: woke at 3:42 a.m., drew a face, did not know her. The faces always have their eyes closed. The women in them always die.Paige has built a life on the belief that everything has an explanation. Now she is following two trails at once: the man who walked her sister to the water, and the older, colder thing that has been keeping an inventory of the marked since long before she was born. Both lead to the same place.And the newest face in the drawer, eyes closed, unmistakable, is her own.A slow-burn literary psychological thriller with a supernatural current beneath it, AN INVENTORY OF CLOSED EYES is the fourth novel in the Hollow Carved Faces series.