Shadows in the Night - Lila's Disappearance

When an undergraduate student vanishes beneath the quiet surface of Lake Monona, Professor Garth Myers is pulled into a mystery he never wanted to face again. Garth is brilliant in the classroom and hopeless everywhere else-an award-winning chemical engineering professor, recovering alcoholic, and two-time divorcé who lives alone on the lake he fears most. As a child, he nearly drowned here. His older brother didn't survive. The water has haunted him ever since. But when Lila Wilcox disappears after whispering that "the lake is awake," Garth's instincts-and his private investigator's license-drag him toward a truth buried far deeper than an academic scandal. A hidden lab. A sealed sub-basement that doesn't appear on campus blueprints. Residue that pulses like neural tissue. And faint, impossible whispers that sound like a voice he thought was lost forever. With his sharp-tongued admin Sheila, his first wife and closest friend Regina, and stubborn detective Martinson, Garth uncovers a forgotten research project from the 1970s-one tied to resonance biology, human consciousness, and something that has been growing beneath Madison for decades. Something alive. Something watching. Something that remembers him. As floodwaters rise under the city and a shadow organization moves to extract whatever lies beneath the lake, Garth must confront the trauma he has outrun his entire life. The deeper he goes, the more the boundaries between memory, science, and the impossible begin to collapse-until he realizes Lila's disappearance isn't the first. And it won't be the last. Shadows in the Night is the first book in the Garth Myers Mystery Cycle-equal parts noir investigation, psychological thriller, and slow-burn speculative suspense. Atmospheric, character-rich, and deeply human, it asks one haunting question: What if the thing that saved you was also the thing that took everything from you?