A mystery novel by local Harbor Island South Carolina resident Phillip Derrick Hampton.

As middle-aged Thad Taylor and a group of old friends return home for a funeral, Thad's mind continues to go back to a seminal moment in the group's history, all the while he tries to rekindle his relationship with his first love.

In 1975 Kansas, Thad and his friends found a necklace caught in a tree limb along the banks of the Cottonwood River. Intrigued by their find, they soon learned the necklace belonged to a young girl who went missing some twenty years earlier but whose body was never found. The police had suspected she was the victim of a serial killer but could never prove it. Determined to solve the mystery, Thad and his friends camped out along the river and searched for her bones. But the night brought far more than they expected, and they found themselves wrapped up in a dangerous adventure they would never forget.

Told from both the past and present, The Cottonwood is a heart-pounding mystery filled with nostalgia and interwoven with humor and suspense that reveals the tender and sometimes difficult moments every adolescent must endure and the effect that the past has on choices they make later in life.