Bone on Bone
A Bell Elkins Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 case -- even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own.
A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn.
Bell has lost her job as prosecutor -- but not her affection for her ragtag, hard-luck hometown. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The inhabitants of the dying town of Acker's Gap, W.Va., face only bleak prospects in Keller's beautifully written seventh Bell Elkins novel (after 2017's Fast Falls the Night). Adults close themselves off emotionally, clutching their despair, while young people are likely to slip into hopeless drug addiction or dealing. Wheelchair-bound former sheriff's deputy Jake Oakes and just-out-of-prison former prosecutor Bell, who was put behind bars after confessing to her abusive father's murder, also appear to have no useful futures, but they get a new focus by investigating the shooting murder of banker Brett Topping. The police question Topping's 19-year-old drug-addicted son, Tyler, but once Tyler is cleared, along with his ultraviolent dealer, Deke Foley, suspicion shifts to more seemingly wholesome members of the community. Despite the pervading melancholy, characters stubbornly struggle to rediscover purpose for their lives and to pin down responsibility for personal failures. This thoughtful, painfully empathetic story will long linger in the reader's memory.
