Surveyor’s Chain: Book one of the Hollow Acre Chronicles
by David A. Nelms · August 2026
The Mississippi Delta, 1887.
Surveyor Silas Vale trusts iron more than memory. A proper chain has one hundred links. A boundary has two sides. A measurement should remain the same no matter who remembers it.
Then Silas is hired to survey six nearly worthless acres in Sunflower County.
The land refuses to behave.
Distances change. Voices drift from places no one can locate. Old records describe events that have not happened yet. At the center of the property stands a pattern of cypress trees surrounding something that should not be there.
With Isaiah Cole at his side, Silas begins documenting every contradiction, determined to find an explanation that does not require him to abandon reason. But the deeper they measure, the more the mystery threatens something more fundamental than distance or time: the boundary that allows one thing to remain itself without becoming another.
Rooted in the history and landscape of the Mississippi Delta, The Surveyor's Chain opens The Hollow Acre Chronicles, a slow-burning Southern Gothic mystery of friendship, grief, memory, identity, and the dangerous things that happen when the lines between them begin to disappear.
Thank you to anyone that views my book!!
— David A. Nelms
About Surveyor’s Chain: Book one of the Hollow Acre Chronicles
The Mississippi Delta, 1887.
Surveyor Silas Vale trusts iron more than memory. A proper chain has one hundred links. A boundary has two sides. A measurement should remain the same no matter who remembers it.
Then Silas is hired to survey six nearly worthless acres in Sunflower County.
The land refuses to behave.
Distances change. Voices drift from places no one can locate. Old records describe events that have not happened yet. At the center of the property stands a pattern of cypress trees surrounding something that should not be there.
With Isaiah Cole at his side, Silas begins documenting every contradiction, determined to find an explanation that does not require him to abandon reason. But the deeper they measure, the more the mystery threatens something more fundamental than distance or time: the boundary that allows one thing to remain itself without becoming another.
Rooted in the history and landscape of the Mississippi Delta, The Surveyor's Chain opens The Hollow Acre Chronicles, a slow-burning Southern Gothic mystery of friendship, grief, memory, identity, and the dangerous things that happen when the lines between them begin to disappear.