Sorrow Road

June 27, 2016
At the start of Keller’s lukewarm fifth Bell Elkins novel (after 2015’s Last Ragged Breath), the West Virginia prosecutor gets a glimpse of the road not taken when she meets law school classmate Darlene Strayer for a drink in a rundown bar. Though the women grew up in similar circumstances, Bell, “who had seemed destined for a glittering career in a big city,” has ended up in an obscure small town, and misfit Darlene went on to become a celebrated federal prosecutor. But now Darlene needs Bell’s help. Darlene’s father, Harmon, died the week before, but despite his advanced years, she feels guilt about his passing. In recent months, Harmon was bothered about something he wouldn’t disclose, and his daughter believes it was connected with his death. Darlene’s fears seem more credible to Bell when Darlene ends up the victim of a car crash. Keller writes well, but a soap opera of a subplot involving Bell’s daughter, who has returned home with a secret, distracts from the main narrative. Author tour. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

June 15, 2016
A deadly accident in 1938 West Virginia is the impetus for several modern murders.Bell Elkins ditched her ambitious husband and high-stress job to become the prosecutor in Raythune County, where she grew up in unhappy circumstances. Her high-powered law school classmate Darlene Strayer also grew up in Appalachia but then stayed away, returning only to visit her father and finally place him in the Alzheimer's unit of Thornapple Terrace in neighboring Muth County. Although Harmon Strayer was almost 90, Darlene has doubts that he and two other patients died naturally, and she asks Bell to look into their deaths. Bell asks her assistant, Rhonda Lovejoy, who has friends and relatives everywhere, to do some gentle probing. Bell's own life is in disarray. She's considering how to handle her love affair with a much younger man when her daughter Carla suddenly calls to say that she's coming home in the middle of a snowstorm. When Darlene is killed on her way home in the same snowstorm, Bell's suspicions are inflamed. Both Bell and Carla still suffer from traumatic incidents in their pasts that underlie their current problems. Carla's already lined up a job interviewing older members of the area for a library project, and Bell doesn't push her to discuss why she's suddenly come home. Impetuous Carla accidentally gets involved in the investigation, putting herself and others in danger. When a worker at Thornapple Terrace is murdered along with her best friend, Bell suspects another connection, though she doesn't yet know about the fraught relationship between Harmon and his two childhood friends or the secret they've kept for years. Although this isn't the best of Keller's deeply nuanced, beautifully written examinations of life and death in hardscrabble coal country (Last Ragged Breath, 2015, etc.), its exploration of the ravages of Alzheimer's is deeply moving.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
In this fifth Bell Elkins novel (after Last Ragged Breath, 2015) from Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Keller, two story linesone happening in the 1930s, one unfolding in the present daycome together in a single gripping narrative. Bell, the prosecuting attorney in Acker's Gap, West Virginia, is asked by a law-school classmate to look into her father's death in a nearby Alzheimer's care facility. The classmate then dies in a car crash. Two women are murdered together in a tremendously moving passage. Bell's daughter, Carla, has made a sudden, unexplained return home. And Bell's relationship with Clay Mackling is in suspended animation. All of these events turn out to be interrelated, with resolution coming only after much reckoning, for all involved, with the collective trauma of their pasts. There is not much you can teach Bell about shock and terror and the wounds that never wash out. She grew up staring into the face of an evil that seemed to drench the world in endless darkness. Her incredible resilience has allowed her to move on, but she is beginning to realize that others, especially Carla, have not been so fortunate. That sense of endless darkness is matched by the relentlessly bleak and treacherous Appalachian winter and by the poverty and despair of the people trapped within it. The setting and the tone will appeal to fans of both Sharyn McCrumb and Julia Spencer-Fleming, and the introspective protagonist and literary quality recommend it to followers of Tana French and Louise Penny. Another outstanding entry in a superb series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2016

Readers who have been following Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Keller's mystery-writing career since she debuted with the well-received A Killing in the Hills should be pleased with this next outing. Here, series heroine Bell Elkins confronts a shocking mystery: at a West Virginia nursing home, Alzheimer patients are dying at an unexpectedly quick clip. Something's wrong, never mind that the cause of death always appears to be natural.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2016

Separated from his dragon brothers, then forced to become human and serve as a dragonmount in humankind's ugly wars, Illarion now has a chance to win back everything he lost centuries ago. But it will cost him. A "Dark-Hunter" book that launches the "Dragons Rising" miniseries; with a one-day laydown on August 2.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.