She was trained to reap the dead. Now she's hunting the people who stole their souls and they're the ones who raised her.Three days after seventeen-year-old Tommy Garrett dies on Highway 34, something wearing his body begins walking. Reaper Nova expects a corrupted corpse. What she finds is worse: copper wire threaded through his bones, his soul already drained, and equipment bearing the stamp of the Council she serves.For eleven years, the Order has been her home. Its rules shaped her. Its authority steadied her. Marcus Trent, the man who rescued and raised her, taught her that obedience kept the world safe.Now its ledgers are hiding the dead.Refusing to surrender the evidence costs Nova her sanction and makes her a target. With a burned forearm, her scythe, and a Triumph Bonneville, she follows the stolen souls into the industrial ruins and frozen back roads of the Missouri River corridor. There she meets Shade Dean: a shotgun-carrying hunter with a black Pontiac GTO and a personal reason to tear the operation apart.His sister Clara is one of the missing.Neither has reason to trust the other. Nova wears the scars of the institution Shade blames, and years of conditioning have taught her that letting anyone close is dangerous. But as their investigation leads through salvage yards, abandoned rendering plants, and hidden depots, surviving means learning to rely on each other.The deeper they dig, the more disturbing the pattern becomes. Missing people are being processed into soul-marrow. Official signatures authorize the theft. Ancient locks beneath the river basin are being forced apart. And something older than the Council is drawing through its machinery, using human greed to reach the living world.The Collector is coming.To stop the harvest, Nova must confront the man who gave her a home and the possibility that everything she called duty helped make this horror possible. Shade must follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if the truth about Clara is the one thing he can't bear to find.As their alliance becomes something neither expected, every choice carries a new cost. Saving each other will mean little if they cannot stop what is waking beneath the roads.For readers drawn to the gritty suspense of Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds and the brutal supernatural action of Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, Blacktop & Bone opens K.K. Schmidt's Reaper Road series with stolen souls, institutional betrayal, and a slow-burning romance built on hard-earned trust.Ride into the darkness with Nova and Shade. The dead have been counted. Someone needs to make them matter.
