Fake hunter. Real monster. No refunds.
Helen Novacic makes a living manufacturing monsters. Through Cryptozoology, Inc., she travels to rural nowhere, plants a few fake footprints, stages a blurry sighting, and cashes the check when the local cryptid festival starts selling T-shirts. It’s legal. Mostly. Victimless. Usually.
Then a teenage township trustee hires her to put Ballville, Ohio, on the map with a Pukwudgie sighting before the town’s New Year’s Eve bicentennial bash. Helen expects an easy payday: one costume, one legend, one carefully managed panic.
Instead, she finds something already hunting the fields and bridges outside town.
Now Helen’s fake monster has competition from a very real one: ancient, armor-plated, and perfectly happy to turn Ballville’s big celebration into a bloodbath. To stop it before the ball drops, Helen will have to dodge a suspicious sheriff’s deputy, a gold-toothed loan shark, one catastrophically ambitious client, and her own chain-smoking mother—who may be the only person in Ohio more dangerous than the monster.
