Hell in the Heartland
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
This stranger-than-fiction cold case is about to crack wide open!
Perfect for fans of I’ll be Gone in the Dark and Zodiac
On December 30th, 1999, in rural Oklahoma, 16-year-old Ashley Freeman and her best friend, Lauria Bible, were having a sleepover. The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing.
While rumours of drug debts, revenge killings, and police corruption abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved and the girls were never found.
In 2016, crime writer Jax Miller travelled to Oklahoma to discover what really happened. What she unearthed was shocking. These forgotten towns were wild, lawless, and home to some very dark secrets.
Finally, in April 2018, the first arrests were made… could justice finally be in sight for the girls and their families?
‘There is, in the best of us, a search for the truth, to serve the living and dead alike…Jax Miller is one of those people and Hell in the Heartland is one of those books’ Robert Graysmith,author of Zodiac
‘Every generation has its standout true-crime writer. Jax Miller does with Hell in the Heartland what Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood’ A.A. Dhand, author of Streets of Darkness
‘Mesmerizing, raw, evocative, unforgettable’ William Boyle, author of A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself
‘A captivating ride through the frustrating twists, turns, and dead ends of a horrifying murder case’ Publishers Weekly
‘Beautiful and devastating’ Crime Reads
About the author
Jax Miller’s first novel, Freedom’s Child, received acclaim from outlets that include The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Italian Vogue and was translated into 16 languages. Miller is a three-time Dagger nominee of the Crime Writers Association in London and in 2016 was awarded the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in Paris by Elle Magazine.
She is executive producer, creator and host of the four-part docu-series Hell in the Heartland, which premiered in the US on HLN in 2019, and is based in her investigative research into the Freeman and Bible murders.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crime novelist Miller (Freedom's Child) debuts with a captivating ride through the frustrating twists, turns, and dead ends of a horrifying murder case. On Dec. 30, 1999, a suspicious fire destroyed Danny and Kathy Freeman's trailer home outside rural Welch, Okla. The Freemans' burned bodies showed that they had been shot to death, and their 16-year-old daughter, Ashley, and Ashley's best friend, Lauria Bible, who had also been in the trailer at the time, went missing. For years, the Freeman and Bible families struggled against inept investigators, drug dealers who might have had reason to kill Danny and Kathy, and a flood of false leads in their search for Ashley and Lauria. In 2015, Miller moved to Welch, where she spent four years investigating the case. She brings a heartbreaking and compassionate voice to her take on those affected by the generational poverty, environmental mining pollution, and widespread methamphetamine addiction now endemic in the region's once ore-rich mining towns. The two girls remain missing to this day, though the arrest in 2019 of a suspect, whose case is ongoing, offers some hope of resolution. This is as much an exploration of the underlying social issues that feed into a system of fear and violence as it is about the crime itself. A vivid storyteller, Miller proves herself as adept at nonfiction as fiction.
