The Mark of Cain

For Eli Cain, a burned-out police chief running from the ghosts of his past, Aggieville, Kansas, was supposed to be a place to disappear. He traded the clean, heavy silence of New York snow for the prairie fog—a thick, damp shroud that muffles secrets and blurs the line between right and wrong. He hung a new shingle—Private Detective—believing the evil out here would be simpler, the corruption more mundane. He was wrong.
There are two kinds of quiet. There is the quiet of peace, the heavy, clean silence of a snowfall, the gentle calm of an empty church in the late afternoon. It is a quiet that heals.
Then, there is the other kind. The quiet of a secret. The thick, damp silence that hangs in a room after a lie has been told. It is the quiet of a small town with a dark heart, a quiet that muffles scream and buries truths. It doesn’t heal; it suffocates.
The story that follows is about a man who came to Kansas searching for the first kind of quiet and found himself drowning in the second. Eli Cain is a man who has seen the rot that festers behind picket fences and beneath tailored suits, a man for whom faith has become a foreign language.
He is a shepherd who has lost his flock, searching for a reason to believe in a world that has given him every reason to doubt.