The House at Old Forest Ridge: An August Rusk Mystery

A missing artist. A wealthy husband with a perfect story. A haunted mountain estate where the dead still remember what the living tried to erase. August Rusk has spent his life finding what other people want left alone. He has no license, no office, and no patience for stories that fit too neatly. When he is hired to investigate the disappearance of Joel Vail, the husband of a powerful Asheville businessman, the case appears simple enough on the surface.
Joel was troubled. Joel became obsessed. Joel walked away from his marriage, his art, and his life. At least, that is the version Marcus Vail wants everyone to believe. But Joel's brother does not believe it. Neither does Marina, the gallery owner who saw Joel's fear sharpen into purpose before he vanished. Neither does Therese, the housekeeper who knows more about the estate than she is willing to say.
And neither does August, especially after he arrives at Old Forest Ridge and finds a word written in condensation on the glass. EAST. Beyond the Vail house, past the birches and the polished stone and the careful silence of wealth, stands the ruined east wing of Ashbourne Institute, a private mountain sanatorium that once promised rest, discretion, and care for wealthy families with inconvenient suffering to hide.
Decades earlier, patients disappeared there. Records were altered. Names were reduced to initials. A young woman named Clara Ashbourne was officially transferred to a facility that never existed. Now Clara appears in windows, mirrors, paintings, and broken glass. She is not simply haunting the estate. She is trying to lead August toward the room where the truth was buried. As August follows Joel's paintings deeper into Ashbourne's history, the investigation turns from missing person case to gothic nightmare.
The old institution is not as abandoned as it should be. There are fresh footprints in the dust, a modern lock on an old basement door, medical supplies where only ruins should remain, and evidence that Marcus's family did not merely inherit wealth from the past. They inherited methods. Joel may not be dead. He may have been made into something worse. And August is not alone in the dark. Asa, the dead man who has long come to him through dreams and longing, begins to appear at the edge of the case, warning him that the danger is not only Marcus, and not only Ashbourne.
Some places learn how to keep people. Some rooms remember their purpose. And some hauntings do not end when the ghost is named. They open a gate. Old Forest Ridge is the first August Rusk mystery: a literary gothic detective novel about disappearance, institutional cruelty, haunted memory, queer love, buried records, and the terrifying ways powerful people can turn control into care. For readers who love atmospheric mysteries, emotionally complex investigators, haunted estates, buried family secrets, and supernatural suspense grounded in human truth, Old Forest Ridge begins a series where the living and the dead both have unfinished business.