Wrong Number: A Small Town, Cozy Mystery, Slow Burn Romance
By Fern Lockwood
[US + UK] A 911 call reports a missing child. There is no missing child. And then the voice at the tree line starts calling Wren's name.
Dispatcher Wren Gallagher has rules. She reads voices, not faces. She logs what she hears, files it clean, and lets the people with badges do the badge work. Eighteen months into the job, she's very good at all of it — which is why the 11:42 PM call bothers her.
A woman whispers that her little boy is lost on the trail behind the old hydro-station. Then...
Show More
[US + UK] A 911 call reports a missing child. There is no missing child. And then the voice at the tree line starts calling Wren's name.
Dispatcher Wren Gallagher has rules. She reads voices, not faces. She logs what she hears, files it clean, and lets the people with badges do the badge work. Eighteen months into the job, she's very good at all of it — which is why the 11:42 PM call bothers her.
A woman whispers that her little boy is lost on the trail behind the old hydro-station. Then the line goes dead.
There is no little boy. There is no report of a missing child anywhere in Havenfall County. And the next morning, a land surveyor named Owen Thayer is found face-down in eleven inches of standing water on a service road that a grown man should have been able to walk out of.
The sheriff's department calls it a fall. Wren calls it the second 911 call she's received this year that Havenfall is very invested in not hearing.
So she starts pulling threads. The survey work Owen Thayer was commissioned for. The parcel of Sorrow Ridge land that keeps getting quietly reclassified. The trail guide who has filed eleven encounter reports and watched every one of them disappear into a protocol nobody talks about. And the deputy — Cole Ashford — who is running a parallel investigation and is very clearly not supposed to be sharing what he's finding with her.
It's not a cryptid. It's a murder.
Except the voice from the tree line — low, human-shaped, pitched just below where a human voice should live — knows her name. And the folder Ruth Becker handed her in December, the one stamped HHS / 1971 and signed in a handwriting Wren has only ever seen on the back of a family photograph, is starting to feel less like a document and more like an inheritance.
Wrong Number is the second book in The Cryptid Dispatcher — a small-town paranormal cozy mystery series set in the fog-threaded forests of coastal Oregon. Full murder mystery, slow-burn romance, one cryptid standing at the edge of the audible spectrum, and a town that has been politely misfiling its own history for thirty-five years.
Show Less
