Whispering Pines

BOOK ONE begins a 24-book, 24-year mystery saga filled with atmospheric suspense, emotional depth, and the chilling realism of rural crime.
No foul language. No graphic content.
Just human motives, cold truths, and a landscape that both shelters and betrays the people who call it home.

The Deputy’s First Winter

Whispering Pines, Wyoming—Year 2000.
A...

A missing teacher. A frightened colleague. A town where silence is survival.
Welcome back to Whispering Pines—where every year hides a secret, and every secret comes with a cost.

When fifth-grade teacher Lydia Barnes unlocks her classroom early one winter morning, she notices something small—something no one else would have questioned. Her...

THE HARVEST WIDOW
A Whispering Pines Mystery
Whispering Pines: 24 Years, 24 Secrets — Book Three

In the fall of 2002, harvest season arrives in Whispering Pines the way it always does—dusty fields, long days, and the steady hum of machinery moving across land worked by the same families for generations.

Then Marie Dalton’s husband is found dead...

RIVER THAW
Whispering Pines: 24 Years, 24 Secrets — Book Four
By TRUDY MYRLAND

When the ice breaks, the past doesn’t stay buried.

Spring arrives late in Whispering Pines. Snow still clings to the banks. The river runs high, fast, and unforgiving—carrying with it everything winter tried to hide.

Seventeen-year-old Brady Holt is fishing the familiar...

Bride in the Pines
A Whispering Pines Mystery: 24 Years, 24 Secrets — Book Five
By Trudy Myrland

In Whispering Pines, weddings are meant to bind families, steady old grudges, and reassure a town that life is still moving forward.

This one never happens.

On a clear early-summer morning in 2004, a bride vanishes just hours before her ceremony—no...

BOOK 24 — THE RIDGE ROAD FINAL CASE (2023)
A Whispering Pines Series
24 Years. 24 Secrets. One Reckoning.

A car sits abandoned on Ridge Road.
The engine is still running.
The doors are open.

Blood coats the seat, streaks the steering wheel, smears the radio and gear shift.
The driver is gone.

Lifelong resident Hannah Keene knows Ridge Road. Everyone in...

Some lines are drawn to mark property.
Others are drawn to hide what should never be found.

When land developer Ellen Price hires a surveyor to map newly acquired property near Whispering Ridge, she expects delays, paperwork, and disputes. What she doesn’t expect is for the surveyor to vanish without a trace—leaving behind incomplete maps, altered...

The Flood at Mill Creek
Book 22 (2021)
A Whispering Pines Novel 24 Years, 24 Secrets

The rain came the way it always had—slow, steady, and easy to ignore.

Until it didn’t stop.

After days of relentless spring storms, Mill Creek finally breaks its banks, collapsing part of its embankment and tearing open ground Whispering Pines believed was stable....

Lockdown Secrets
A Whispering Pines Thriller / Horror Novel
24 Years, 24 Secrets

When the world shut down, Whispering Pines didn’t get safer.
It got quieter.

Jamie Rourke was one of the few people still moving through town.
As a grocery clerk turned delivery driver, she brought food to locked doors, dark houses, and people no one else checked on....

Some houses creak.
Some houses settle.

This one watched.

When David Merrill buys a foreclosed house on the edge of Whispering Pines, he’s looking for quiet. The price is low, the paperwork clean, the past supposedly uncomplicated. It’s just an old place with thick walls, long hallways, and a view of the trees that feels almost peaceful.

At first,...

THE LAST RODEO GIRL
A Whispering Pines Novel — Book 19

Every summer, the rodeo comes to Whispering Pines.

Lights flood the arena. Music rattles the stands. Families cheer. Traditions repeat themselves the way they always have, unquestioned and familiar. For a few days each year, the town believes it knows exactly who it is.

Then a girl disappears.

At...

WHERE THE CATTLE DON’T ROAM

A Whispering Pines Thriller
Book 18 of Whispering Pines: 24 Years, 24 Secrets

For years, Whispering Pines survived on silence.

Then the land answered back.

When cattle refuse to graze on familiar ground, ranchers assume disease, predators, or bad weather. But when animals won’t cross certain fields—won’t drink the water,...

THE BROKEN FENCE LINE

A Whispering Pines Thriller
Book 17 of the Whispering Pines: 24 Years, 24 Secrets series

In Whispering Pines, some boundaries are meant to hold cattle.
Others are meant to hold people back.

When a longtime ranch owner is found dead near a collapsed fence line, the town assumes the truth is obvious. A decades-old feud. A familiar...

AMAZON BOOK DESCRIPTION
THE SNOWFALL WITNESS
A Whispering Pines Thriller Book 16

In Whispering Pines, winter does more than isolate the town.
It watches.
It waits.
And when the snow falls hard enough, it reveals what was never meant to be found.

During a relentless winter storm, postal worker Heather Lenox follows her familiar delivery route through...

Some nights pass without consequence.
Some strangers leave without a trace.
And some meals are never just meals.

After midnight in Whispering Pines, routines matter.
The night-shift diner runs on habit, repetition, and silence. Orders rarely change. Faces are familiar. And Marcus Reed—the cook who works while the town sleeps—knows exactly what...

In Whispering Pines, nothing feels more ordinary than a late-night diner. The coffee is always hot. The grill hums steadily. The same routines repeat long after midnight, comforting in their predictability. But some visitors don’t come for the food.

When a quiet stranger takes a booth near the window during the calmest hour of the night, Marcus...

On a five-thousand-two-hundred-acre ranch that has never changed hands in seven generations, silence is part of the job.
So is danger.

When ranch hand Miguel Torres notices something wrong along the calf run, it isn’t blood that stops him—it’s the quiet. Livestock don’t move that way. Fences don’t fail that cleanly. And land that’s worked for...

Whispering Pines Series
24 Years, 24 Secrets
BOOK 12 — (2011)

In the quiet mountain town of Whispering Pines, records are supposed to keep order.
Balances are meant to settle.
Numbers are meant to explain things.

They don’t always.

When Ruth Hale—a careful, unassuming bookkeeper—opens her late husband’s old ledgers, she expects routine accounts and...

FROST ON THE GATE
A Whispering Pines Mystery
Book Eleven — 2010

In Whispering Pines, winter doesn’t just freeze the land.
It preserves secrets.

Sixteen-year-old Lily Carson has grown up learning the quiet rules of ranch life: close the gates, mind the weather, and don’t ask too many questions. Especially about abandoned buildings. Especially about...

Some roads disappear from maps.
Others disappear from conversation.

Cold Ranch Road is one of those roads.

Traveling salesman Peter Ames is just passing through Whispering Pines when a late-night drive changes everything. On a stretch of isolated road locals avoid after dark, Peter hits something with his car. The impact is real. The sound is...

In the mountain town of Whispering Pines, some places are never meant to be found.

When traveling nurse Dana Kline takes an unfamiliar back road between patient visits, she expects nothing more than a rough shortcut. Instead, the road narrows, the land shifts, and an abandoned slate quarry appears where it shouldn’t—silent, deep, and waiting. At...

When the windstorm tore through Whispering Pines, it left fallen trees, blocked roads, and a town eager for something—or someone—to blame.

By morning, one man hadn’t come home.

At first, the explanation was easy. The terrain was dangerous. The weather had been unpredictable. Accidents happened out here. Everyone knew that. Storms took things....

The Fire Line
Whispering Pines: 24 Years, 24 Secrets — Book 7

Fire never starts loud.
It waits.

In the quiet mountain town of Whispering Pines, smoke is noticed before sirens ever sound. By the time help arrives, a barn is already burning—and the man inside it is already dead. Officials call it an accident. The town is eager to believe them.

But...

Book 6 in the Whispering Pines Mystery Series
24 Years. 24 Secrets.
One town that never forgets—no matter how hard it tries.

On a quiet night in Whispering Pines, every dog in town began to bark.

Not one yard. Not one street.
All of them.

For fifteen long minutes, the town listened.

By morning, everyone agreed it had meant nothing.

They were wrong.

The...