Pruned

Description

He’s correcting the family tree. Wherever a bloodline split — a second marriage, an affair, a half-sibling nobody talks about at holidays — he arrives to trim the branch he’s decided doesn’t belong.

Genealogist Otto Vasquez builds family trees for a living, which is how he notices the shape of the deaths before the police do. The victims are scattered across the state with nothing obvious in common — different ages, towns, lives — until you draw the lines, and the lines all bend back to shared fathers, secret half-siblings, the messy real branches of families that look tidy on a holiday card. Someone is reading the same charts Otto reads, and editing them with a knife.

The logic is warped and absolute: a private gospel of purity and lineage that decides which children count and which are weeds. Otto, who was a half-brother himself, who grew up the branch nobody mentioned, recognizes the math with a sick lurch. The newest victim shares a father with the one before. The pattern is climbing toward a particular tree — one Otto drew years ago, for a client, with his own name quietly on a lower limb. He could burn the file. He starts mapping where the killer goes next instead.

Psychological horror rooted in the secrets every family keeps, this one finds the monster in a warped idea of belonging. The fear is being judged unworthy of your own blood — and meeting the man who’s appointed himself the gardener.

Trace the tree. He’s already found your branch.