The Listening Room

A dead woman's voice is waiting on a tape that should be blank.

Cora Keene restores damaged audio for archives, museums, and cold-case investigators. She knows how to separate signal from noise. She trusts the evidence her equipment can measure, even as her own hearing begins to fail.

Then a reel-to-reel tape arrives from the Coldwater Heritage Foundation, recovered from a decommissioned government listening station in the Oregon fog. The label says there is no content of note. But beneath the hiss, Cora isolates a woman's voice speaking a name and a date.

Renata Fenn. August 14, 1994.

Renata disappeared from that same station years after the tape was supposedly recorded.

When Cora travels to Coldwater to restore the full collection, she finds more voices buried in the reels. More names. More impossible details. Then a living woman vanishes exactly as one of the tapes foretold, leaving behind a brass hummingbird charm on wet pavement.

The station was built to listen.

But someone kept it listening long after it was abandoned.

As Cora follows the signal through hidden rooms, wired walls, grief circles, and decades of missing-person records, she discovers that the haunting may not be a ghost at all. It may be a machine. And the town's sorrow has been feeding it for years.

Dark, atmospheric, and psychologically sharp, The Listening Room is a supernatural mystery thriller for readers who love eerie small towns, impossible evidence, cold cases, and the terrifying question of what remains after every voice has been recorded.