Creature of Secret Sorrows, by Dianne L. Hagan, returns to Cadence, New York, a town where history is never inert and the dead have unfinished claims on the living. When Randy Nichols disappears during a rockhounding walk, the search leads Marian Greene and her neighbors to a brutally lynched body in the woods. What begins as a murder investigation widens into a confrontation with ancestral violence, hidden family lines, supernatural guardians, and the damage passed down through the Hayward legacy. The mystery coils around Randy’s grief for his newly found mother, Madison’s fractured family, and the apparition of the asanbosam, a creature that seems less interested in terror than in justice.

I was struck by how Hagan refuses to separate the procedural from the spiritual. Cadence is full of police work, interviews, evidence, and old documents, but it is also a place where lake drums, bears, legends, and restless souls press against ordinary life. That mixture could have felt ungainly in a lesser book, but here it gives the story its pulse. The supernatural elements are not decorative fog; they are moral weather. They make visible what polite history tries to bury.

My strongest reaction was to the novel’s emotional density. Hagan writes community with breadth: meals, jokes, old resentments, marriages, griefs, and arguments all crowd the page. At times, the large cast demands attention, especially for readers new to the series, but the reward is a world that feels inhabited rather than staged. Randy’s tenderness, Madison’s jagged survival, and Marian’s weary courage give the horror a human temperature. I appreciated that the book is not content with simply exposing evil; it asks what repair might look like after truth has done its bruising work.

I would recommend Creature of Secret Sorrows to readers who enjoy supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, Black horror, historical suspense, ancestral trauma fiction, and community-centered crime novels. Fans of Stephen King’s small-town supernatural stories may recognize the sense that an entire place can become a haunted witness, though Hagan’s focus is more intimate, more reparative, and more explicitly tied to racial history. This is a dark, sinewy mystery with a conscience.

Pages: 320 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GZK9V7MX