When a retired detective extracts a missing boy from a Virginia orphanage, he unknowingly delivers him into a centuries‑old ritual — and must fight a living covenant that has already chosen his family as the next offering.

SYNOPSIS:

ABE NATHANIEL, a retired homicide detective, takes what appears to be a simple extraction job on his first day out of the precinct: recover a missing boy and return him to his family. The boy, ISHMAEL, is real. The family is not. When Abe delivers the child to a small Virginia town called Canaan, the receiving party greets him with the exact words he was given at hiring — a liturgy, not a greeting — and Ishmael stands among them like a package that has arrived at its destination. Abe goes back in. What he finds beneath Canaan’s colonial church is a subterranean chamber four hundred years old, a congregation mid-ceremony, and a bronze calf with a child inside it. He pulls Ishmael out and runs, but the debt he interrupted does not close — it follows. Now Abe must protect a boy who was never meant to survive, keep his family from becoming collateral on a covenant that predates the country they live in, and find the one scholar who knows what this is before the ancient creditor collects what it’s owed.

THE LAST OFFERING