Dark Below

Not all secrets stay buried. Not all deaths are what they seem.When Chase Loudermilk, a troubled veteran, is found dead, everyone assumes it’s suicide.Everyone except his criminology professor, Teddy Drummond. A former cop haunted by painful memories, Teddy suspects Chase has been murdered, and that the answers lie hidden in his shadowy past.Drawn reluctantly into the case, Teddy teams up with Detective Raina Bragg—a woman with every reason to hate her. As the two dig into the town’s buried secrets, what they uncover is more than a motive. It’s a chain reaction of choices, each darker than the last.Then another body turns up.Now, in a place where everyone’s lives are tangled and few are truly innocent, Teddy and Raina find themselves in a race against time to stop a killer and expose the truth: that some consequences take years to surface—and the most dangerous secrets are the ones nobody sees coming…

Sherry Rankin grew up in New Jersey and has taught creative writing and literature in West Texas since 1997. After winning the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger award and being shortlisted for the Daniel Goldsmith First Novel Prize in 2017 (for an as-yet-unpublished novel), she went on to be shortlisted in the Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition in 2019.Sherry has a daughter in New Mexico and enjoys gardening and walking her dogs.The Dark Below is her second novel; her first, The Killing Plains, was published in 2025.