A city is built.Something is buried.The dead begin to collect.When human remains are uncovered during a rushed redevelopment project, the city of Riverside makes a choice it has made before: erase the problem, rewrite the language, and move on. Personal effects vanish into evidence rooms, private collections, and quiet hands that tell themselves they are protecting history.Years later, people start to die.Each death is precise. Unexplainable. Connected not by guilt, but by possession. Objects taken from the dead begin to return to the ground-and anyone standing in the way is crushed, suffocated, or broken by an unseen force that does not rage, does not linger, and does not forgive.Forensic pathologist Naomi Walker and records analyst Isaiah Cole uncover the truth too late to stop the first deaths and just in time to realize something far worse: this is not a haunting driven by anger.It is an accounting.The dead are not seeking revenge.They are seeking completion.As the list of reclaimed objects grows shorter, Naomi and Isaiah race to understand what the dead want-and how to give it to them-before the city itself becomes collateral. Because once the final item is recovered, the ground will decide whether it finally rests... or opens again.Dark, methodical, and deeply unsettling, The Dead Always Collect is a supernatural horror novel about buried systems, stolen identity, and the terrifying idea that some debts do not fade with time.They wait.And when the living refuse to finish what they started, the dead will.