Officer Jack Ballinger receives a phone call from the chief of police in the early morning hours regarding a dead body at an apartment building in a quiet neighborhood in the small upstate New York town of Black Falls. A female student lies in a pentagram outlined in her own blood, clutching a rosary. Ballinger and his former partner Officer Cory Ryan interview tenants in the building about the girl’s death, but are met with more questions than answers.<br><br>When another body is found in the same apartment building a few hours later, Jack knows something is wrong. As he ciphers through a patchwork of unexplainable clues, the investigation detours when Ryan disappears from the case and cannot be found.<br><br>With his future as an officer in question, will Ballinger be able to deal with the truth of these crimes once he dscovers everything he thought he knew was a lie?

Past Sins

“You’re one hell of a cop friend, Jim,” he says, and I’m too busy keeping him upright to care or correct him. “I love you, man.”


I kick the passenger door to my cruiser shut with the back of my heel, and stumble through a narrow space between two parked cars to get to the front walkway leading to his apartment door.


“I feel sick,” he tells me when we reach the curb, and I lose my grip on him.


He falls against the hood of a white Porsche convertible and tumbles to the ground.


His impact crushes a flowerbed of daffodils as he lands hard on his back, staring up at me, eyes glazed. He cries out in agony, a piercing groan, just as I am looking around for any movement from behind one of the curtained windows in the bank of condos.


We eventually make it to his front door ten minutes later. Holding him with one hand, I dig around inside his mailbox for a house key.


Chapter 28