Blackgum — An upmarket suspense novel

Where blood uncovers the past, and power decides how long the truth can stay buried.

Blackgum is an upmarket suspense novel set in rural East Texas, where old ranching families, local institutions, and inherited power have protected the truth about a young woman’s disappearance for thirty years.

When former FBI investigator Hana Moore is brought in to identify human remains found on Blackgum Ranch, genetic evidence leads to Jennifer “Jenny” Gilchrist, a Korean adoptee who vanished in 1997. A second DNA trail points toward Danny Jenson, the last man known to have seen her alive, creating a case that appears ready to close. But Hana uncovers another bloodline buried beneath the evidence—and realizes that proving what happened will require challenging the judge, lawmen, and prominent families who helped shape the official story.

This is a story about identity, guilt, institutional power, and the dangerous distance between a case that can be prosecuted and the truth that actually occurred.

Hana Moore has built a second career using genetic genealogy to identify the dead. When human remains recovered on Blackgum Ranch lead to Jennifer “Jenny” Gilchrist, a Korean adoptee who vanished from East Texas in 1997, Hana believes she may finally be able to return a name to a forgotten woman.

A stronger DNA trail points toward Danny Jenson, the last man known to have seen Jenny alive. Wallace County investigators begin assembling a clean case against him, while Hana faces a looming conflict review and a Monday deadline for the charging decision.

But the evidence does not fit as neatly as the official story. Records have been sealed, local families have protected one another, and a weaker genetic trace leads toward the Cade bloodline and the institutions that have shaped justice in the county for decades.

As threats close in and the case against Danny hardens, Hana must decide how far she will go to expose what happened at Blackgum—and whether telling the truth can still save an innocent man once the law has chosen its version of the past.

• Upmarket suspense rooted in identity, memory, and moral consequence
• A regional mystery about genetic evidence, inherited power, and the danger of a case that looks too clean
• A story about adoption, guilt, institutional loyalty, and the people forced to live beneath an official lie

This is not a story about justice arriving neatly.

It is about what happens when the evidence points one way, the truth points another, and an innocent man may be condemned before anyone is willing to see the difference.

(Halfway into Chapter 1)

...She opened the profile detail expecting a distant cousin, a bad tree, a half-supported branch attached to a surname too common to mean what the screen was trying to mean. The page loaded in the bright, indifferent order of systems: kit number, relationship estimate, shared segment, total shared centimorgans. The relationship sat in the second-degree band, the crowded range that included half siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandchildren. It was where a lead stopped behaving like a lead.

The profile was not a stranger’s kit number with privacy rules around it. Hana recognized it because it was hers, an old genealogy profile she’d created before Double Helix under a private email, for a maternal-line search she never finished and never disclosed as relevant to any case. Back then, it hadn’t seemed like a professional fact. It was one woman awake too late, typing her mother’s surname into boxes that did not answer.

The dead woman in Wallace County shared 1,768 centimorgans with Hana Jieun Moore. Her index finger lifted off the mouse and did not come back down.

Hana read the number twice and then made herself stop. Reading it again wouldn’t move it.

Procedure existed for exactly this moment. Hana taught it to other people. When a forensic lead returns a close biological relationship to anyone connected to the analyst, family, friend, the analyst herself, you stop. You flag the conflict, hand the case off, and document it. The relationship didn’t have to be named. It only had to be close enough to compromise the work. A second-degree estimate to her own profile was several orders of magnitude past plausible.

© 2026 by Duskin Hill. Excerpt from an unpublished manuscript. All rights reserved.

This manuscript is currently in submission status. 

The book cover shown is merely a concept at this stage.

→ Learn more about the author behind the work