Joey's a Baltimore mechanic. One night, she receives a call from her best friend, asking for his car to be picked up from the infamous body dumping grounds of Baltimore: Leakin Park. When she arrives, there's little more around than a stalled-out car and a couple of ravens, so she leaves only with the car. Back at the body shop, it doesn't take long for the smell of rot to permeate the trunk. Inside? A corpse. The cops say her friend did it. His absence is his guilt, but Joey knows better. She will find her missing friend and she will prove his innocence.
But something isn't right in Baltimore. It's not just the feeling that someone is always watching from the city's abandoned buildings... Her search for her friend reveals something much worse hiding under Baltimore. A ghost town, a reaper, regret. Suddenly, the city's rage and the stink that rising out of the dirt make much more sense.
Ian Kirkpatrick is a speculative and satirical author with interesting credentials: an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tampa and a BA in Theater from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She's lived in a high desert, the frozen tundra, and the subtropics, so, she's got most extreme climates covered. The things she writes can be as dramatically different as the places she's lived, though she tends toward black comedy, satire, and different forms of speculative fiction. She's written novels, short stories, stage plays, and screenplays. She's fairly obsessed with the good and evil in humans, contrast, and the absurdity that is people.