Some books you decide to write. Others just move in.

Farmhouse Forgotten was the second kind. It started with a picture I couldn't shake: a house set back off Highway 46 in Shandon, California, porch light on, front door open, screen unlatched, the television still going inside. September 1987. The kind of ordinary evening that shouldn't have ended the way it did.

By morning, the Davenport family was gone. The parents. Three-year-old Kelly, vanished. Only the baby survived — found alive in his crib by grandparents who drove down from the Clovis foothills into the worst day of their lives.

Twenty-three years later, that baby is grown, and he wants the truth.

The case at the center of the book

Farmhouse Forgotten is Book Two in the Lindsay Carter and Boyd Parker series, and it's a cold case in the truest sense — not a file that was never opened, but one that was closed too neatly by people who preferred it that way.

Lindsay takes the case on behalf of the survivor, and what starts as a records search turns into something with teeth: an age-progressed sketch of a girl who would be in her late twenties now, a grandmother's hairbrush and what DNA can do with it, a farmhouse fire that destroyed more than a building, and a ranch-country power structure — land, water, vineyards, a judge, a family name — that has spent two decades making sure the old story stays underground.

It's small-town suspense set in Central California wine and grazing country, where everyone's grandparents knew each other and the property lines are older than the grudges. That's the engine of the book: not a stranger in the dark, but the awful possibility that the answer has been sitting a few miles down the road the whole time, protected by people who still hold the deed.

I wrote it because I wanted to know what happens when someone finally refuses to let a town be comfortable.

The finalist news

Farmhouse Forgotten has been named a finalist for the Indie Gold Award.

I want to be specific about what that recognition is, because the specificity is the part that means the most to me. The Indie Gold Awards exist for one thing: mystery, thriller, and suspense writing by independent authors. Not general fiction with a crime subcategory tacked on the end — the whole contest is built for this genre, with categories spanning traditional mystery, thriller and suspense, cozy, noir and psychological, private eye and detective, and police procedural.[3]

The judging reflects that focus. Submissions are read anonymously, so nothing competes on the strength of a name or a following. A reader panel scores entries against a rubric built around the things suspense actually lives or dies on — originality, pacing, character, voice, and suspense itself. The entries that score highest advance to the finalist round, where they're judged by working indie authors and publishing professionals in the mystery, thriller, and suspense world, including award-winning thriller author Joslyn Chase and Amazon best-selling author and Ibis Books founder Jason Cannon.

Finalists are recognized across Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers, with a grand prize on top.

I'll be honest about the scale of it: this is a newer, genre-focused indie contest, not the Edgars. I'd rather tell you that plainly than oversell it. But here's why it landed the way it did — being read blind, by people who read suspense for a living, scored on pacing and voice and whether the tension holds, is exactly the kind of feedback a crime writer wants. It isn't a popularity contest. It's people who know the genre saying the book works.

For a story about a family nobody in town wanted to keep talking about, "somebody paid attention" feels like the right kind of win.

Thank you

None of this happens in a vacuum. Every reader who picked up the book, left a review, or told a friend that the Davenport case kept them up too late — you're the reason this story got out of my head and into the world.

Winners are announced soon, and you'll hear it here first.

If you haven't met Lindsay Carter and Boyd Parker yet, Farmhouse Forgotten is available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited. And if you've already read it, a quick honest review is still the single most useful thing you can do for a book like this one.

More soon — Boyd and Lindsay aren't done.

— Juliet Dillon Clark

P.S. You can purchase your copy here!