The Town That Forgot
Book One of The Town That Forgot Trilogy
"Some towns don't hide crimes... they hide memories."
Get Your Copy
Book One of The Town That Forgot Trilogy
"Some towns don't hide crimes... they hide memories."
Get Your CopyA town that erased itself. A girl who noticed.
When eighteen-year-old Rowan Hale arrives in Hollow Bend, she expects another temporary stop in a life defined by moving boxes and new zip codes. Instead, she finds a town where roads vanish from maps between one printing and the next, where names disappear from public records like ink fading in rain, and where silence isn't awkward — it's policy.
The locals talk around things. They answer questions with questions. They change the subject with the practiced ease of people who've been doing it for decades.
But Rowan has never been good at letting things go.
With Mae, a local girl who knows every unspoken rule she's starting to resent, and Eli, a puzzle-obsessed history buff who treats archives like treasure maps, Rowan follows a trail of altered records, hidden brass keys, and buried policy decisions that point to something the town agreed to forget — together, on purpose, a long time ago.
What they uncover isn't a crime. It's a promise. And breaking it open means deciding whether truth is worth more than the peace built on top of it.
"In Hollow Bend, memory can save you. It can also erase you."
469 pages of atmospheric mystery. No gore. No villains. Just a town with a secret it kept out of kindness — and three teenagers brave enough to ask why.
Three books. Three seasons. Three layers of a town's hidden past.
Rowan arrives in Hollow Bend and discovers a house that doesn't appear on any map. The deeper she digs, the more the town pushes back — not with threats, but with silence. What she finds beneath the silence changes everything she thought she knew about secrets.
Letters begin appearing around Hollow Bend, addressed to people the town swears never existed. But someone remembers. And someone wants those connections restored — whether the town is ready or not.
When the lake recedes further than anyone can remember, it reveals something the town buried at its founding. The final truth isn't just about Hollow Bend's past. It's about why it exists at all.
Hannah Pierce writes about the towns that keep their own counsel — the places where everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows what not to say.
She's drawn to stories where the mystery isn't who committed a crime, but why an entire community decided to look the other way. Stories where the villains aren't villains at all, just people who made hard choices and lived with them quietly for a very long time.
Her writing lives in the space between what a town remembers and what it chooses to forget.
The Town That Forgot is her debut novel and the first book in a trilogy about Hollow Bend — a place that feels like it could be any small town in the rural Northeast, if you drove far enough down the right road and didn't ask too many questions.
She believes the best mysteries are the ones that end not with punishment, but with understanding.