Don’t you just love it when a mystery writer has a PhD, won a Pulitzer as a journalist, and went to Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship? Julia Keller, West Virginia’s leading genre writer is back again at her fictional West Virginia small town of Acker’s Gap. And again her protagonist is Bell Elkins, who has reappeared in her home town not as a prosecutor, but as an ex-con. Booklist gave this novel a starred review and commented, "Keller can spin a mystery plot with the best of them, but it’s her full-bodied characters and the regard they have for one another that really sets her crime fiction apart: a bride’s back-of-the-hand caress of her new husband’s cheek, and his response, is a moment that will linger in memory long after the crime is solved." Library Journal also awarded a starred review and said, “This haunting, thought-provoking story proves Keller is one of a kind.” The National Book Review commented, “Compulsively readable and rich with psychological and social insight… Keller emphatically captures a community beset by hardship and caught in a downward spiral that she is determined to break.”
New York: Minotaur, 2018. 307 pages. Hardback in dust jacket