The Receding — An upmarket literary suspense novel

Where drought gives the past back, and water decides how long the truth can stay above ground.

The Receding is an upmarket literary suspense novel set in drought-stricken northeastern New Mexico, where a dying reservoir exposes more than cracked mud, old roads, and forgotten foundations.

When former forensic anthropologist Clay Morris comes to Lake Cielo intending to disappear, he finds a rusted 1930s sedan and human bone exposed on the lakebed. What begins as a local forensic discovery soon pulls him into the buried history of St. Dymphna Industrial Home, a vanished Catholic children’s institution once hidden beneath the reservoir.

This is a story about witness, erasure, memory, and the uneasy difference between recovering the past and owning it.

Clay Morris has come to Soledad, New Mexico, to live quietly in his dead parents’ house and finish disappearing from the world. But when drought pulls Lake Cielo down to a fraction of its old shoreline, Clay discovers a 1930s sedan and scattered human remains in the exposed mud.

Sheriff Marcus Baca needs Clay’s expertise, even as he distrusts the broken man who found the bones. Sandra Estévez, a ranch woman whose family has lived near the old water longer than the lake itself, knows the exposed road leads somewhere people stopped naming.

As records surface, disappear, and contradict one another, the investigation points toward St. Dymphna Industrial Home, where poor, Indigenous, Hispano, Mexican, mixed-race, and unwanted children passed through a system of county payments, church records, changed names, and missing ledgers.

Then the weather turns. As stormwater begins filling Lake Cielo again, Clay, Sandra, and the town must decide what can still be named before the lake takes the evidence back.

• Upmarket literary suspense rooted in landscape, memory, and moral consequence 
• A regional mystery about buried history, unstable records, and the cost of witness 
• A story about drought, water, institutional silence, and the people left to live with what resurfaces 

This is not a story about solving the past neatly.

It is about what remains when the answer is partial, the water is rising, and the dead have waited long enough.

(Opening of Chapter 1)

The lake road ran out before the water did. Clay Morris took the truck off the last of the gravel and onto the cracked flats, the black Ram rocking over plates of dried mud that snapped under the tires like fired crockery. Slow served him better than haste. Tracks showed. Tracks brought people down later, asking the sort of questions Clay spent most of his adult life answering after the answer no longer did anybody much good.

From the north, off the county road, he followed the high ground where Soledad sat tucked between its two draws. Lake Cielo looked the way it looked all summer, hardly a lake anymore, only a crooked brown reach far down in the basin, running northwest to southeast in the old cut, maybe an eighth of what the dam was built to hold. At the head of the basin, the dam stood gray and dry-footed, its spillway gates high above ground that hadn’t taken water against them in two years. The rest was bottom. Pale, sun-struck, fissured bottom that ran a mile or more before it found the shrunken margin of what remained.

The boat-ramp grade was paved partway, and no one used it now except teenagers, sheriff’s deputies, and men too careful about where the mess would be found.

© 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.

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