Book Two

Martin Hale disappeared while investigating something beneath the streets of Milwaukee that everyone else dismissed as obsession.

His son Owen is left with nothing but a box of notebooks, a handful of cassette tapes, and questions no one wants answered. As relentless storms expose forgotten tunnels and impossible passages beneath the city, Owen uncovers evidence that his father may have been chasing something terrifyingly real.

People are hearing familiar voices through old pipes. The grieving are being drawn toward places they cannot explain. Every discovery points to the same unsettling truth: beneath the city's aging infrastructure lies a hidden network known only as the Return Paths-routes that blur the boundary between memory and presence, hope and obsession.

But the greatest danger isn't what waits below.

It's what waits there wearing the voice of someone you've lost.

As Owen, Merrick Sloan, Daniel Mercer, and a handful of unlikely allies race to understand what the Keep has become, they discover that grief can reshape a city, memory can become architecture, and not everything that returns was ever meant to come home.

The Return Paths is the haunting second novel in The Broken Table Trilogy-a literary supernatural thriller where forgotten places remember, impossible choices demand a price, and the most dangerous invitation is the one that promises one more conversation with the person you could never bear to lose.