The Dry City Trace

In a town dying of thirst, the ground is beginning to sink. The young woman who discovered why has disappeared.

Vesper Flats is three years into a devastating drought. Its reservoir has retreated to a white ring of salt, its farms are failing, and those with somewhere else to go have already begun to leave.

Private investigator Del Cranmer has built a narrow, quiet life finding people, serving papers and avoiding the water district where she once worked. Then Margo Deel arrives with a photograph of her missing daughter.

Joss Deel is a gifted young hydrology researcher who has spent months crossing the county, measuring abandoned wells and recording what the official figures overlook. Before she vanished, Joss said she had found something larger than drought. The notebooks she left behind reveal water levels falling too quickly, official records that do not match the land, and a connection to the unexplained death of a district worker years earlier.

Following Joss’s measurements into the dead riverbed, Del joins forces with surveyor Rafa Sorondo, whose family has already paid for getting too close to the truth. Together, they uncover sinking ground, a falsified groundwater map, a buried pipeline and a supposedly decommissioned pumping station that is still operating in the dark.

Behind it lies a scheme that has turned scarcity into opportunity, frightening landowners into selling while a decisive county vote approaches.

But the deeper Del follows the evidence, the closer it draws her to the decision that ended her former career and to the truth she has spent years refusing to face.

With Joss running out of time, Del must decide what she is prepared to lose to expose what has been done, and whether accountability can offer any form of repair when the dead cannot be restored and the damage cannot be erased.

The Dry City Trace is an atmospheric literary environmental thriller about water, corruption, institutional silence, moral complicity and the difficult work of telling the truth after silence has already cost lives.

Enter Vesper Flats, where records can be altered, evidence can disappear, but the ground remembers.