The Creek That Carried Names
A Lottie Mae Surratt Novel · Book Two
Mercy Ridge has buried its girls for decades. They just didn't count on Lottie Mae Surratt.
When a woman is found facedown in the baptism creek behind Bethel Mercy Baptist, the sheriff calls it suicide and goes home for supper. Lottie Mae Surratt ? retired detective, uninvited, and constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone ? stays behind. She finds names carved into the stones beneath the waterline. Old names. Girls' names. The kind Mercy Ridge has been calling runaways for thirty years.
What looks like one woman's death opens into something the county spent decades burying: a quiet church program called Mothers' Mercy that didn't save troubled girls so much as disappear them, with the blessing of deacons, sheriffs, and upstanding men who are still sitting in their same pews ? and who have never once been held to account for it.
Until now.
But the case has a second floor. A young girl named Tessa has gone missing from the church grounds, hearing names in the creek water no one else can explain. A dead pastor's wife left behind a notebook full of things she was too afraid to say out loud. And in a banker box Lottie Mae has been avoiding since her father died, there's an unfinished investigation with her name in the margin ? and a cold case called Caroline Bell that the creek seems determined to resurface whether anyone is ready or not.
Sharp-tongued, relentless, and haunted by every child who didn't get the kind of help that comes with a badge, Lottie Mae Surratt is the detective Mercy Ridge has always needed and consistently failed to deserve. She doesn't solve cases and move on. She remembers every name. And in a county built on silence, that makes her the most dangerous woman in the room.
The Creek That Carried Names is a Southern Gothic mystery drenched in red clay, creek water, and the particular fury of a woman who knows exactly what silence protects ? and has never once kept it.
