Mike McCabe.

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“Curious thing about small towns, there are few places where it’s harder to hide but not many where it’s easier to keep secrets.”

That early passage in award-winning writer Mike McCabe’s debut novel, Miracles Along County Q, sets the tone for a twisting, turning mystery that upends rural stereotypes as outcasts work wonders in a beleaguered country town.

Released this month by Little Creek Press, the book’s central character Ray Glennon is sent away at birth, brought back nearly nine years later, and becomes a target of torment.

When a series of confounding incidents adds to the community’s hardship, it escapes no one’s attention that Ray figures in each. Notes written in a hand no one recognizes curiously find their way into Ray’s possession. The cryptic messages help bring about disclosure of long-kept secrets and the rescue of stricken neighbors, as faculties of the human spirit are employed that only in the rarest instances get put to use.

The people, places and events in Miracles Along County Q are very real but fictionalized with a spritz of the supernatural, inspired by the author’s own small-town upbringing.

Mike McCabe has lived his life straddling America’s rural-urban divide. Reared on his family’s dairy farm in rural Curtiss, he’s called both cities and small towns home, even lived abroad for a time. Mike has been a farmhand, journalist, educator and civic leader. He’s had two nonfiction books published. Miracles Along County Q is his debut novel.