What the Earth Keeps by Phil Morrison

Joe Ferren digs the graves in Riverbend, twenty-eight hundred souls scattered across the muddy hills of southwestern Wisconsin. Like his father before him, he hears the dead—never for long, never clearly, ten minutes at most, scraps of voices rising out of the fresh earth. He stopped talking about it the night the whole town laughed in his face. They think he's crazy. That suits him fine.

Two months after eighteen-year-old Janet Collinwood is buried—an overdose, the police say—the girl calls to him from her grave. The drugs didn't kill her. Someone pushed her, then pressed the lethal dose into her arm while she lay unconscious below the loft. She gives Joe a name: the son of Senator Cooper. And she tells him a single object, forgotten beneath her bed, can undo the man who did it.

But Janet's voice grows fainter every day, and soon it will fall silent for good. Joe has only weeks to turn a dead girl's secret into proof strong enough to bring down the most powerful family in the county—with no credibility, alone against a machine that has buried other truths before, and before the Coopers realize that he, too, knows.

A cold, atmospheric supernatural thriller in which justice has only one witness: a voice that is fading away.