OMThe Dream WriterOctavio Marulanda G.
While the Festival Played book cover

The Harrow Mysteries · Book Two

While the
Festival Played

The music never stopped.
Neither did the mystery.

Forty thousand visitors have come to the Everglades Seafood Festival. Beneath the lights, music, stone crab, and crowded streets, a man named Dale Mercer is found dead—and the identity he carried has no past.

EVERGLADES CITY · SEAFOOD FESTIVAL WEEKEND

Celebration Above · Secrets Below

The whole town
is looking elsewhere.

The festival moves like weather: vendor tents, fiddles, carnival rides, seafood smoke, and thousands of strangers arriving all at once.

Ray sees what celebration makes easy to miss. Dale Mercer has been coming here for years, yet the life attached to his name begins only eight years ago. Someone planned his death in the dark—and knew the south access from the water.

Bogey
01

Twelve Years of Knowing

Bogey

Older now, but still fast when it matters. He reads Ray, the crowd, and the evidence with the confidence of a partner who has spent years doing exactly this.

Fina, the Colombian Fino Hound
02

The New Nose in Harrow

Fina

Small beside Bogey. Black and white. Very long ears and blue eyes that seem painted on. The young Colombian Fino Hound follows a scent through the festival—and stops exactly where Ray needs to look.

Her ears are not a flaw. They are part of how she finds the way.

Returning to Harrow

Familiar faces.
Different stakes.

Ray Calloway
Ray Calloway

The investigator who cannot stop looking

A nearly finished book waits at the cabin while a dead man’s missing past pulls Ray back toward the work he thought he had left.

Lisa Vega
Lisa Vega

The life built beside him

Lisa helped reopen Harrow’s library and gives Ray the kind of truth he is least able to avoid.

Sheriff Elijah Pruitt
Sheriff Pruitt

Forty thousand people. One killer.

The Sheriff needs something he can move on before Sunday night sends every visitor home.

From the Prologue

The Festival
Doesn’t Know Yet

The cabin had become the place where the book lived.

The last chapter has been the thing Ray cannot yet do for nine months.

The Second Harrow Mystery

Listen past the music.

A mystery about identity, belonging, and the courage to step forward with the very thing that makes you different.

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