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Mind Games
Paperback
Publisher: Margot Barnes
Published: Oct 16 2026
Pages: 472
Weight: 1.08
Height: 1.17 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Absolutely - here's a fuller IngramSpark-ready description that stays comfortably under the 4,000-byte limit while giving the story a little more room to breathe:
Twenty-four years ago, Coldwater Ridge learned to fear the dark.
Eleven people were murdered between 2000 and 2002, their bodies left beside isolated mountain roads, carefully positioned where passing drivers would find them. Abandoned vehicles waited nearby with hazard lights blinking into the night. White roadside reflectors were placed in the victims' hands.
The killer became known as the Ridge Man.
He was never caught.
Tessa Vale was fifteen when her mother, Lacey, became victim seven.
Now thirty-nine and working as an investigative journalist in Raleigh, Tessa has spent most of her adult life putting distance between herself and the town that remembers her as the sheriff's daughter whose mother was murdered. But when her father, retired Sheriff Daniel Vale, dies unexpectedly, Tessa returns to Coldwater Ridge for his funeral and finds herself pulled back into the case she has spent twenty-four years trying to escape.
Then another body appears near Miller's Gap.
The victim is Warren Pell, the retired medical examiner who performed Lacey Vale's autopsy. His body has been staged using the Ridge Man's familiar ritual.
And before Tessa can decide whether the nightmare has truly returned, someone leaves a message beneath her windshield wiper:
ASK YOUR FATHER WHY I STOPPED.
Daniel Vale spent years hunting the Ridge Man. Coldwater Ridge believed he failed.
Tessa is beginning to suspect he knew far more than anyone ever realized.
Hidden files, altered records, old photographs, missing evidence, and a secret signature never released to the public begin dismantling everything Tessa believed about the original murders. Her father had been quietly investigating someone close to the family. Her mother may not have died the way the official record claimed. And the truth Daniel buried may connect the original Ridge Man murders to the people now dying in Coldwater Ridge.
The deeper Tessa digs, the more dangerous the investigation becomes.
Old witnesses begin talking. Long-hidden evidence resurfaces. People who carried pieces of the truth for decades suddenly have reasons to be afraid. And Tessa is forced to confront a possibility more devastating than any unsolved murder:
The people she loved may have known exactly what happened.
They may simply have chosen silence.
Set against the shadowed mountains of western North Carolina, Mind Games is a gripping psychological mystery about family secrets, buried evidence, loyalty, guilt, and the dangerous stories people tell themselves in order to survive the truth.
Because sometimes the most dangerous lie isn't the one someone tells you.
It's the one an entire town learns to live with.
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