In Too Deep is far from your typical love story. In this heart-pounding coming-of-age thriller inspired by my time as a student at a small liberal arts college in the South, the mundane world of a quaint college campus is transformed into a ruinous realm of torture and tantalizing, dangerous desire.

Here at Clearwater College, friends become enemies and lovers strangers. No one is safe. Nothing is as it seems. Kyle Bennett goes off to college, doing what so many young men his age do. Little does Kyle know that the place he will call his home for the next four years is a snare shrouded in innocence, a purgatory of peril, a creeping lair of sorrows, secrets, and shadows hellbent on swallowing him whole. In this heaven soon to become Kyle’s own personal hell, the phantoms of the past and the specters of the future come to life. For Kyle, his fate comes in the form of a gorgeous female face. Kyle meets the girl of his dreams, a beautiful, brown-eyed lover lying in wait for him - Sussie Bishop.

Tragedy soon strikes the star-crossed lovers. The tall, attractive, athletic poster students of Clearwater College are cast into catastrophe. Kyle discovers lies, love, and lust. He makes friends, attracts and antagonizes enemies, gets into dramatic drunken brawls at fraternity parties, broods by the lake, and breaks up fights between roommates over territorial girlfriend disputes — all typical college-kid things. But there is nothing normal about Kyle’s time at Clearwater. During his final year of college, Kyle lives with a terrible, twisted secret only he and Sussie share. If revealed, the secret will doom them both. But all paradises must come to an end, even Kyle’s star-crossed romance with Sussie Bishop. When Sussie leaves Kyle, leaving him lost and alone, Kyle must bear the burden of the secret alone.

But Kyle soon discovers he is not alone. You can bury the past, but you cannot always bury those in it.