The Lanterns of Bracken Hollow

About this book

In Bracken Hollow, Washington, the mineral hot springs do more than loosen sore shoulders — soak long enough and your memory sharpens: misplaced keys, forgotten names, the second verse of a lullaby your mother sang once. Tourists come for it. The town survives on it. And every autumn the Lantern Festival sends paper lanterns down Steam Creek carrying messages to the people the Hollow has lost. Three weeks before the festival, the springs start running cold. The same week, art teacher and festival organizer Della Voss disappears from her cottage, leaving a half-painted lantern, an overturned mug of chamomile, and eight words in her own hand: The springs remember what we chose to forget. Four seventeen-year-olds who have never been friends end up in the same boathouse arguing about it. Reni Okafor, the springs' part-time attendant, felt the cold coming three days early and wrote down a warmer number to protect her family's job. Felix Trang, Della's art protégé, paints on canvas soaked in spring water and watches other people's memories bleed up through the color. Meera Kapoor keeps the guest register at the failing Hollow Inn and has noticed three strangers who checked in using surnames that belong to towns that no longer exist. Cob Brandt, the plumber's son, has mapped a pipe junction that appears on no blueprint and radiates cold like an open freezer. As the springs flash warm at random and hand back fragments of a fifteen-year-old winter, the four begin to understand that something was put into the deep spring on purpose, by people who are still alive, still on the council, still smiling at them in the grocery aisle. Della found it. Someone would rather she stayed lost. Eighteen days. Fraying friendships, small-town loyalties that pull harder than truth, and a magic that keeps giving back the one thing the Hollow agreed to bury. Cozy in its steam and cinnamon and wet cedar, and entirely serious about what a community owes the people it decides not to name.

Book details

Genres:

Cozy Mystery, Urban Fantasy, Young Adult, Small-Town Mystery, Magical Realism

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-26

Content rating:

PG-13