In A Killing in the Hills, a powerful, intricate debut from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Keller, a mother and a daughter try to do right by a town and each other before it's too late.What's happening in Acker's Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was...

In the next stunning novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Julia Keller, following the popular A Killing in the Hills, a pregnant teenager is found murdered at the bottom of a river.Phone calls before dawn are never good news. And when you're the county's prosecuting attorney, calls from the sheriff are rarely good news, either. So when Bell Elkins picks up the phone she already knows she won't like what she's about to hear, but she's still not prepared for this: 16-year-old L...

"[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 ReviewPulitzer 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...

The Devil's Stepdaughter, a story from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller, takes us back into beloved prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins's past. The year Bell turns eleven, she's living with a foster family in the beautiful but poverty-stricken mountains of West Virginia, and Keller draws a heartbreaking portrait of the time in Bell's life that shaped her into a woman who believes in fierce justice and fighting back.

Bell Elkins, prosecuting attorney and small-town heroine of Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Keller's A Killing in the Hills, Bitter River and Summer of the Dead, faces one of her most challenging days in this exclusive digital short story. Featuring an exclusive extract from her new full-length novel Last Ragged Breath.For Bell Elkins no day is ever the same.But on this day, for the third day running, Bell has woken up from the same dream. A ...

In 1944, three young men from a small town in West Virginia are among the American forces participating in D-Day, changing the fortunes of the war with one bold stroke. How is that moment aboard a Navy ship as it barrels toward the Normandy shore related to the death of an old man in an Appalachian nursing home seventy-two years later?In Sorrow Road, the latest mystery from Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Julia Keller, two stories—one set in the turbulent era of World War II...

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 thi...

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller comes A HAUNTING OF THE BONES, another suspsenseful and provocative story that will keep readers up all night...Bell Elkins, prosecuting attorney for Raythune C1ounty, West Virginia, had always believed what she'd been told: Her mother abandoned the family when Bell and her sister, Shirley, were children. Later, Teresa Dolan died somewhere out West.And then comes a shattering discovery.During an excavat...

By day, she's a tough-minded prosecutor in Raythune County, West Virginia, a region scarred by poverty and prescription drug abuse. By night, Bell Elkins takes on a softer role. She volunteers at an auxiliary intensive care unit where nurses deal with the youngest and most vulnerable victims of drug abuse: the children born to mothers addicted to painkillers.The place is known as Evening Street, and it is here Bell comes whenever she can spare the time. She rocks ailing infants to ...

From the night-black depths of a coalmine to the sun-struck peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, from a riveting murder mystery to a poignant meditation on the meaning of love and family, the latest novel in the critically acclaimed series strikes out for new territory: the sorrow and outrage that spring from a real-life chapter in West Virginia history.Royce Dillard doesn't remember much about the day his parents-and one hundred and twenty-three other souls-died in the 1972 Buffalo...

Bone on Bone, the next powerful chapter in Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's beloved Bell Elkins series, sends readers headlong into the thick of a mystery as young as today's headlines -- but as old as the mountains that hold these lives in a tight grip.How far would you go for someone you love? Would you die? Would you kill? After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly...

Based on a real-life event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller’s latest Bell Elkins novel Fast Falls the Night takes place in a single 24-hour period, unfurling against the backdrop of a shattering personal revelation that will change Bell’s life forever.The first drug overdose comes just after midnight, when a young woman dies on the dirty floor of a gas station bathroom. To the people of the small town of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, it is just another tragedy. It is sad—...