The Bell Elkins Novels - Book 3
Summer of the Dead
“Keller is such an accomplished prose stylist and storyteller that she leaves readers with only one dilemma: whether to read nonstop to reach the outcome or to take time to savor the well-wrought complexities of this exceptional novel.”
Booklist (starred review)
Following the powerful A Killing in the Hills and Bitter River from Pulitzer winner Julia Keller, a spate of violent crime in Acker's Gap, West Virginia casts suspicion on a struggling young woman's family.
High summer in Acker's Gap, West Virginia-but no one's enjoying the rugged natural landscape. Not while a killer stalks the small town and its hard-luck inhabitants. County prosecutor Bell Elkins and Sheriff Nick Fogelsong are stymied by a murderer who seems to come and go like smoke on the mountain. At the same time, Bell must deal with the return from prison of her sister, Shirley-who, like Bell, carries the indelible scars of a savage past.
In Summer of the Dead, the third Julia Keller mystery chronicling the journey of Bell Elkins and her return to her Appalachian hometown, we also meet Lindy Crabtree-a coal miner's daughter with dark secrets of her own, secrets that threaten to explode into even more violence.
Acker's Gap is a place of loveliness and brutality, of isolation and fierce attachments-a place where the dead rub shoulders with the living, and demand their due.
Praise