Carmen

Every road is supposed to take you somewhere. Some roads decide to keep you.

In the mid-1990s, eight-year-old Carmen Ramínguez leaves St. Augustine, Florida, with her family for a long-awaited road trip north to Danbury, Connecticut. There are maps on the dashboard, games in the back seat, roadside billboards outside the windows, and the promise that every turn of the wheel is bringing them closer to home.

Then the radio begins behaving strangely.

A voice breaks through the static. A roadside attraction appears ahead. And what should have been an overnight stop at South of the Border becomes something Carmen's family cannot seem to leave.

At the center of it all is Benny the Bone-a fast-talking, cigarette-smoking showman whose jokes make Carmen laugh even as her father becomes convinced that something is terribly wrong.

The clocks don't agree. Roads return to where they started. Employees know things they shouldn't. And beneath the neon lights, something is watching the highway-and waiting for Carmen.

Carmen: The Girl That Time Kept is a psychological supernatural horror novel about childhood, family, memory, grief, and a place where time doesn't simply disappear.

It remembers.

Volume Three of the South of the Border Universe, Carmen reveals the childhood behind one of the series' central characters while offering a haunting entry point for readers discovering the universe for the first time.