Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In the next powerful mystery from Julia Keller, former West Virginia prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins investigates the murder of a teenager while continuing to rebuild her life.
Bell Elkins and Jake Oakes make a good team, so good that they decide after years of working together to hang out their shingle: BJ Investigations, LLC. With his former-cop's instinctive approach and her former-prosecutor's affinity for facts, they're a perfect fit for the routine clients who come their way. It's not until Amber Slight's body is uncovered face down in the West Virginia woods that they get their first real challenge.
With most of the forensic evidence at the scene destroyed by a week of rain, Bell and Jake have to rely on their wits to figure out what really happened to Amber, a mystery that may lead back to the halls of Ackers Gap High School. As Bell tries to uncover the truth, an old friend returns to town with motives Bell doesn't quite trust. It's up to Bell to face both challenges, those that could impact the living and those that honor the dead.
Pulitzer-prize winner Julia Keller returns to her acclaimed series that is as much about the life of a small Appalachian town as it is about the lives and deaths of its citizens.
Synopsis
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller welcomes readers back to West Virginia, where her lyrical and moving stories of the people of her native state have unfolded since A Killing in the Hills, the acclaimed first novel in the series.
Deep in the woods just outside Acker's Gap, West Virginia, rises a ragged chunk of what was once a high stone wall. This is all that remains of Wellwood, a psychiatric hospital for the poor that burned to the ground decades ago. And it is here that Bell Elkins - prosecutor turned private investigator - makes a grim discovery while searching for a missing teenager: A dead body, marred by a ghastly wound that can only mean murder.
To solve the mystery of what happened in these woods where she played as a child, Bell and her partners - former sheriff Nick Fogelsong and former deputy Jake Oakes - must confront the tangled history of Wellwood and its dark legacy, while each grapples with a private torment. Based on a true chapter in the troubled history of early treatment for psychiatric illness, The Cold Way Home is a story of death and life, of despair and hope, of crime and - sometimes, but not always - punishment.
Synopsis
" An] emotion-charged mystery.... Keller's sleuths are easy to like and the murder story is moving; but the object of fascination here is Wellwood, a state-run mental institution with a dark history as a repository for 'rebellious, unruly women.'" --The New York Times Book Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller welcomes readers back to West Virginia, where her lyrical and moving stories of the people of her native state have unfolded since A Killing in the Hills, the acclaimed first novel in the series.
Deep in the woods just outside Acker's Gap, West Virginia, rises a ragged chunk of what was once a high stone wall. This is all that remains of Wellwood, a psychiatric hospital for the poor that burned to the ground decades ago. And it is here that Bell Elkins - prosecutor turned private investigator - makes a grim discovery while searching for a missing teenager: A dead body, marred by a ghastly wound that can only mean murder.
To solve the mystery of what happened in these woods where she played as a child, Bell and her partners - former sheriff Nick Fogelsong and former deputy Jake Oakes - must confront the tangled history of Wellwood and its dark legacy, while each grapples with a private torment. Based on a true chapter in the troubled history of early treatment for psychiatric illness, The Cold Way Home is a story of death and life, of despair and hope, of crime and - sometimes, but not always - punishment.