Seven years ago, architect and planner Daniel Thompson disappeared in East Texas. His car was found. His belongings surfaced in strange places. His trail ended near Livingston. But Daniel himself was never found.
Now, after the death of Daniel’s son Aaron, Captain Jack “Hawk” Hawkins reopens the case that never truly left him.
What begins as a review of an old missing-person investigation quickly leads back to the work Daniel was doing before he vanished—a sweeping tribal development project stretching from the Alabama-Coushatta lands near Livingston to Mount Tabor and the historic Caddo country of Northeast Texas. Daniel had begun asking questions that reached far beyond architecture. Questions about ancient settlement patterns. Tribal homelands. Land ownership. Family history. And a carefully filed Notice of Genealogical Interest that introduced uncertainty into property worth millions.
Officer Cara Overton follows the money. OSBI investigator Betty Penny follows the records. Hawk follows Daniel.
And slowly, the past begins to move.
An old prepaid telephone. A powerful Texarkana family. A childhood connection buried for decades. A backpack that may not have traveled the way investigators once believed. And a man named Raymond Pritchard, whose presence in Daniel Thompson’s story may have begun much earlier than anyone realized.
As the investigation moves from Ada to Texarkana, Livingston, Hochatown, and Hot Springs, Hawk and his team discover that Daniel’s disappearance may have been surrounded by far more deception than they ever imagined.
But deception is not the same as murder.
And sometimes the most complicated mystery is created not by what happened—
but by what people did afterward.
The Caddo Claim is a richly layered Lighthorse mystery about land, ancestry, tribal history, family secrets, and the dangerous consequences of one man insisting that the past still matters.
