Kindly Skins - Paperback

by A. J. Kelley (Author)

There is an old wives' tale about Winters in Gregor, Maine: "When winter comes, and fire dies, keep shut your doors, avert your eyes. For hungry mouths, wear kindly skin, and call your children to come within."

When Enola and Kingston Williams flee Boston for the quiet coastal town of Gregor, they hope distance will help them mend their broken marriage, destroyed in an affair. But Gregor is not the refuge they imagined. The forest surrounding the coastal town and their home carries a presence, an entity that feels like the woods is possessed by something studying and toying with its next prey...them.

As winter deepens, life begins to settle. Enola and Kingston acclimate into their new lives, form new friendships, and the hope of a normal life, free from infidelity, cautiously returns. But Gregor's past soon creeps through the snow: a heartless, disemboweled deer is found on their property, cultish symbols are scrawled in blood near their home, and a silent stranger is seen watching from the woods. As stories surface of women vanishing and fires erasing the evidence, Kingston is drawn into the orbit of Shepard, a local police officer haunted by grief and his mother's slow decay. Together, the two men begin to suspect that Gregor's history is not finished repeating itself.

What Kingston and Shepard find will force them to confront the truth about Gregor, the thing that lives behind the stillness of the snow, and what may be wearing the skin of the women they love.