Pocket

Dex Holloway lives in his car, ignores his check engine light, and measures his entire worth by what he can pull out of other people's junk.

He's a pocket hunter, one of the thousands who test estate-sale objects hoping to reach inside a two-dollar mug and find a fortune folded into impossible space. Mostly he finds nothing. Mostly he almost dies. He's fine with both, which is its own kind of problem.

Then he finds the mug.

It looks like a small cave, worth maybe three grand on the black market. Another almost-score. Except when he goes in to map it, twenty minutes inside turns out to be eight minutes outside, and the little cave keeps going, tunnels and chambers and worked stone that somebody carved on purpose, more space than could ever fit inside a cup he could close his fist around. His surveyor friend Yuki tells him to report it and walk away. He promises he will. He's lying, and he knows he's lying, and he goes back in alone anyway, because this is finally the discovery that proves he matters.

He should have stopped. He didn't. And when he finally brings Yuki and the eager trust-fund kid Finn in to help him understand what he found, the pocket does something no documented pocket has ever done. It seals. The exit is gone, solid stone where the opening was, and the only way anyone has ever recorded out of this place is further down, past a builder's carvings that read deeper still, it goes deeper still.

Now three people are trapped inside a dying dimension with twelve hours of food and a mug that could crack at any moment out in a world that has no idea they're gone. False Bottoms is their survival story, and it's Dex's, the slow reckoning of a man who has to decide whether the biggest discovery of his life is worth more than the two people who followed him into it. Funny, fast, and claustrophobic, the first book in a series about doors disguised as junk drawers.