How Stoneveil Was Created

So how did I come up for the premise for this idea? In the case of Stoneveil: Shadows Under Ice, it started with a conversation with my mother-in-law.

At the time, I was working on another story and asked her to read it. She told me it was fine, but it really wasn’t the type of story she normally enjoyed. She mentioned that she preferred murder mysteries and crime stories.

That got me thinking.

I’ve always enjoyed small mountain towns in books, movies, and television. There’s something interesting about a place where everyone knows everyone else—or at least thinks they do. So I started wondering what would happen if a murder occurred in a town where murders simply don’t happen.

Then the idea evolved.

Instead of a recent murder, what if the victim had died months earlier? What if winter itself had hidden the crime? Living in the Northwest, I’ve seen what snow can do. Roads disappear. Trails close. Entire sections of the landscape become inaccessible for months at a time.

So I asked myself a simple question: What if a killer used winter to hide a body?

That question became the foundation of Stoneveil: Shadows Under Ice. A missing man. A mountain town. A body revealed only when the thaw finally arrives.

Once I had the premise, everything started falling into place. The town. The mystery. The suspects. The secrets.

And eventually, the investigator who would have to uncover the truth.

I’ll save more about Galen Voss for another post.

For now, I wanted to share the spark that started it all.

Below is a short excerpt from Chapter One:

Snow crunched beneath Galen Voss’s boots as he walked across the Sheriff’s Office parking lot. Dawn had barely broken over Stoneveil. As the eastern skyline began to glow with early light, the Sherriff's Office parking lot lights remained illuminated from hours before. Barnes had already arrived—his muddy truck idling in the reserved spot. Galen stayed outside a moment, taking in the chill while the last headlights blinked out across the lot. He paused at the bottom step and huffed out a breath of mist, examining the building in front of him. He had entered that door for the final time six months ago—not as staff, but as someone Barnes only called when things were already wrong.

His finger moved across his jawline scar while he continued to walk. The hinge screeched as he pushed through. His left leg answered in kind.       

The smell met him before the door swung shut—burnt coffee, dusty file cabinets, stale air from vents that never quite did the job. The crackle of the Dispatch radio on the front desk blended with Sheriff Barnes’s voice drifting down from his back office.    

“I don’t care what Jeff’s maintenance schedule says Dana. The south side trails were supposed to close down till next week.” Barnes growled, his low voice filling the small station. “No, I’m not giving Eric Paulson a written because—" Galen counted the stairs to the bullpen—seven, an odd number that always bothered him. Nothing had changed since he left. Carpet still showed bootprints down the halls, bulletin boards still dotted the walls with outdated flyers, and someone had managed to refill the coffeepot with grounds even though there was a hairline crack down the side of it.

Barnes leaned against his office doorway, phone cradled between shoulder and ear. His face showed a bright red color that anyone familiar with bureaucracy would instantly recognize as frustration painted onto the surface of his skin. Barnes was built like a man who’d spent his youth working livestock—broad shoulders, thick through the chest, the kind of solid that doesn’t come from a gym. His gaze fixed on Galen and he nodded curtly throughout the conversation.

“He walked in. Yeah. Alright, we’ll call you from the scene.” Barnes slammed the phone down before Galen could reply. “Voss. You weren’t exactly crawling over here.”             

“You said urgent.” Galen matched his tone to that of the sheriff’s, letting his eyebrows do most of the talking between them. They weren’t friends, exactly. More than acquaintances, but not friends. Their connection was similar to two college roommates who'd become all too familiar with each other's closets.

Barnes’s hair had gone mostly gray at the temples, salt overtaking the pepper, and he maintained his tuck-in shirt style, although his shoulders had lost their stiff posture from his rookie days. Barnes shook his head to motion Galen into his office.             

“I wouldn’t have bothered you if I had a choice.” He closed the door.     

“I know.” Galen stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, instinctively scanning the evidence piled haphazardly across Barnes’s desk. Barnes said he didn’t read files before investigators showed up on scene, but Galen knew better—you always read everything, or you missed something important.             

Barnes sighed and dropped into his chair, moving like a man who’d done forty winters in this county and felt every one. “Trail worker found a body this morning. Lower Mountain Loop. Young male. Could be hypothermia.”             

The skin around Galen’s mouth pinched tight, an old reflex he hadn’t missed. “Of natural causes?”             

“If getting stuck headfirst in a drainage culvert is natural,” Barnes said, “then yes.”           

Barnes slid a file across the desk. “But that’s not why I wanted you here. Based on condition of the body, he’s been there awhile.” Galen opened the file. The pages were filled with handwritten notes scrawled across brown stationery and a single, poor-quality photo taken on a cell phone. Galen hardly needed the photo—covered in a thin layer of translucent ice, blue lips curled up around frostbitten teeth, it looked like a textbook example of a winter kill. “Any ID?”

“No positive ID, but everything we know points to Cody Rennick. Local mechanic. Missing since last November’s first big storm. Search went out, but—” Barnes waved vaguely toward the window, toward the white peaks that circled Stoneveil like a hawk surrounds its prey. “You know how things get around here when winter comes."

Galen knew. He’d chosen Stoneveil for exactly that reason.

"What do you need from me?" Galen asked, though he already knew the answer; Barnes wouldn't have called him for a simple recovery.

Barnes leaned forward, elbows on his desk. "The trail worker who found him—good guy, reliable—he says there were tracks. Old ones, preserved under the snow, now showing through with the thaw. Tracks that suggest Rennick was dragged to that culvert."