Nine mornings, and then nothing. Then the first morning again, with Delia Cobb still carrying everything she learned the last time through.

Frances Colgan sets her novel in a West Virginia company town that has spent thirty years agreeing not to ask questions. The tremors in the men coming off the rendering floor get written down as stress. The memory lapses get written down as drink. Delia is the last nurse in a clinic funded by the plant that is making her patients sick, and she has worked out that whatever is in Harlow cannot be treated and has already reached everyone it is going to reach. Warren Odell owns the plant, the clinic’s money, and the only road out of the valley. He knew before she did. He has it too.

The book runs on repetition rather than escalation. Each nine-day cycle hands Delia one more piece — a shipping manifest, a burial permit, a name typed onto a form that should not exist — then takes the town apart again in a different order, with a different set of people left standing at the end. What she cannot do is reach a tenth morning, and nothing she does to Odell changes that. The loop has rules. They are not moral ones, and the novel is unusually honest about the gap between being owed something and being able to collect it.

The register is quiet and close-focused. The speculative premise works as pressure on character, not spectacle, which makes this one for readers drawn to Appalachian settings, to fiction about institutional silence and occupational illness, and to time-loop stories that refuse the consolation of a clean solve. The prose stays at ground level: exam rooms, paperwork, the mechanics of a place that decided not to know.

We publish it as a standalone at 320 pages, available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. There is no series to commit to and nothing deferred to a next book.

If you want a loop story where the trap is a place and the counting matters, start here. Find it on Amazon →