The Hollow Bellow

Some cities bury their dead. New Orleans keeps ledgers.

When Adele Marchand's body is found arranged with ritual precision, Detective Marcus Boudreaux catches a case nobody above him wants solved. The evidence doesn't point to a killer. It points to a lineage.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Renata "Ren" Auzenne sees what the crime scene photos won't show: markings that repeat across decades of unexplained deaths, a pattern older than the department itself. Together they follow the thread down into the city's cradle lineages - bloodlines cultivated in secret for generations, tended by those who believe some children are born for a purpose, and some are born to be spent.

But the deeper Marcus digs, the closer the ledger's entries come to his own name.

A Southern Gothic noir where the occult isn't a rumor - it's an inheritance. The Hollow Below descends through four generations of secrets to ask what a city owes its dead, and what its dead are owed.