Wolf Twin Books Releases Noir Novel
Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags
New novel by Thomas L. Vaultonburg explores institutional silence, power, and the cost of telling the truth.
ROCKFORD, IL — January 14, 2026 — Wolf Twin Books announces the release of Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags, a new noir novel by poet-turned-novelist Thomas L. Vaultonburg. The book explores how abuse, power, and institutional silence allow harm to persist — not as an anomaly, but as a pattern.
“This novel isn’t about monsters. It’s about the systems that keep making them.”
— Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Blending hard-boiled detective fiction with psychological and cosmic noir, Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags follows two professional outsiders — private investigator Elias Mort and crisis analyst Janelle Montclaire — as they take on cases no institution wants to touch. Their work leads them into shadowed spaces where truth threatens money, reputation, and the stability of entire systems.
“Most stories about monsters focus on the individual,” said Vaultonburg. “This one asks a different question: what kind of world keeps making them?”
The novel examines the broader machinery that enables exploitation to survive — privilege that functions as armor, institutions that prioritize risk management over justice, and communities that choose silence over disruption.
Vaultonburg wrote the novel after witnessing how institutional silence and reputation management devastated real people in his hometown of Rockford, Illinois.
Through Mort’s methodical investigations and Janelle’s sharp understanding of how organizations control narratives, the novel reveals how predators are rarely hidden — they are protected. Files vanish. Witnesses are discredited. Stories are quietly rewritten. What appears to be coincidence becomes pattern.
The story unfolds through investigations, records, and narrative fragments that mirror how institutions document — and distort — reality.
Set against a backdrop of urban decay and creeping cosmic dread, Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags blends noir’s moral tension with a contemporary examination of power, complicity, and the cost of telling the truth. As Mort and Janelle peel back layers of deception, they discover that every step toward clarity increases the danger — not because the truth is false, but because it is expensive.
Availability
Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags is available now in Kindle edition via Amazon:
https://a.co/d/i0eSTpW
About the Author
Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a poet, haikuist, and small-press publisher based in Rockford, Illinois. His work has appeared in The Heron’s Nest, Presence, Wales Haiku Journal, Haiku Commentary, and Failed Haiku.
Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags marks his debut novel and continues his long-standing interest in the intersection of narrative, memory, and the systems that shape human lives.
Vaultonburg posts a daily haiku on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/wolftwinthomas.bsky.social
