Skulldiggery

With the pinprick of summer fresh on his skin, a young boy stumbles upon a horrifying secret long buried in the forgotten past of a small midwestern community. Sharing the disturbing discovery with his best friends, the boys set out on the adventure of their young lives, hoping to unravel a mystery over 100 years in the making. One that left a scarred graveyard full of discarded bodies in its wake, and a deep divide between those avoiding history and those unwilling to see it repeated. Without the comfort of an adult they can trust, their terrifying encounter haunts them the rest of their lives. Each blind to the murky darkness it left festering deep inside them. Haunted by a series of recent and barely believable events, Russell Stander returns to the long-abandoned home of a deceased relative he'd last visited as a child. Hoping to discover a connection between what he'd witnessed there in the past, and freshly unveiled revelations. Enlisting the help of his best friend, retired detective Tom Secrist, Stander painstakingly peels back the layers of time. Searching for any connections, and the abandoned friendships he'd long left behind. Four boys, coming-of-age in the 1980s, bound by loyalty and their thirst for adventure. Each tarred with a lingering stain that changed the course of their tattered lives forever.

As the First World War rages, a lone assassin navigates sprawling fields of death by secreting himself within the soiled mazes of the ravaged frontlines. The young Native American soldier, Anong, conflicted by loyalties and his place in the world, must cross lands seeded in local superstitions and ancient folklore. When he saves a young boy from a pack of predatory locals, Anong, and the child soon find themselves facing something far more frightening than the horrors of war. Russell Stander, returning to the same ancient quarry where his mother met her own grisly end decades earlier, helps recover a newly revealed find. Alongside a team of handpicked archeologists, Stander puzzles over what has been unearthed. Desperate to shed light on the scattered and varied pieces of the evolving mystery. But what emerges − voraciously hungry, disturbingly malformed, and shockingly violent - keeps Stander and team cloaked in darkness. Can any light be found within the trench?