Blue Palo Verde (2025-)

The sun-scorched asphalt of a New Mexico highway is the first thing Kristine Woods sees as a free woman. Her homecoming is hollow; her father has vanished into the remote, forgotten settlement of Blue Palo Verde. The town, a cluster of adobe and rusted metal swallowed by the desert, does not welcome outsiders. Kristine’s search for him pushes past the town’s silent, watchful residents and into the bleached arroyos beyond. What she finds there is not a man, but the shape he has become—a transformation tied to the dry earth and the whispering things that grow in it. The air smells of creosote and old blood.