Mack DePaul

A dark psychological horror thriller in which a semi-retired detective, six hardened criminals, and a disturbed man on his first real date collide in one restaurant, each carrying secrets, grudges, and reasons for revenge. Detective Eugene Rivers has spent forty years hunting the men who destroyed countless lives and disappeared behind power, money, and silence. He knows exactly who they are. He just never had the proof to bring them down.
Until one strange night at The Black Olive restaurant. There, Rivers finds himself seated across from the suspects he has chased for four decades. As six aging murderers gather for dinner, he realizes the past is no longer willing to stay buried. Across the room, a reclusive man named Darly Clemmens sits with a veiled woman who seems to be watching the old men. To Darly, she is the answer to a lifetime of loneliness and rejection.
But something is deeply wrong. What he mistakes for devotion is hardening into possession-and drawing vengeance closer. What begins as an uneasy evening inside a quiet family restaurant becomes a collision between buried crimes, unfinished grief, and vengeance that has waited decades to strike within a single locked room. Hauntings of a Hollow Vessel is a psychological horror thriller about obsession, control, and the violence that follows when emptiness is given a body.