Special Agent Daniel Stansfield has one day left at the FBI. He has already handed in the paperwork; he is already, mentally, gone. Then Denver calls, and Denver is the one place he swore he would not go back to — the city he fled four years ago, and the case that emptied him out.
The Drifters have started again. People are found on the highways at night, standing in headlights, dazed and unable to account for themselves: no memory of where they have been, no sense of how long they were gone, a stranger's skin wrapped around their shoulders, and a single human hair tied around the tongue. Four years ago Daniel led the investigation into these murders and got nowhere. Now the bodies are turning up again, and the Bureau wants the man who failed the first time.
The reinvestigation takes him back across the Front Range, into the snow, and — steadily, without ever announcing it — out of the world of evidence and into something older. What Daniel is chasing has been circling his own childhood for a very long time, and the closer he gets to the case, the harder it becomes to pretend that this was ever a professional matter.
Headlights is C. J. Leede's third novel, from the author of Maeve Fly and American Rapture. It begins as a police procedural and ends as folk horror, holding both without flinching: an unhurried, extremely bloody book about grief, about what trauma stores and what it eventually does with it, and an unabashed love letter to Stephen King's The Shining, set in the frozen Colorado wilderness.