Drifting South
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Shady doesn't exist anymore. Neither does Benjamin Purdue. In a single day he lost his family, his love, his freedom and even his name for reasons he's never known. Now after spending twenty-one years in prison for crimes he didn't commit, the young man he used to be is dead. And the man he's become is no one he—or anyone else—would ever want to know.
With only fifty dollars of state money in his pocket, Henry Cole, aka Benjamin Purdue, journeys back to the dangerous outlaw settlement hidden deep in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia where it all began. The only place he's called home.
Instead of answers, he finds only old sunken graves. Now as he drifts southward, he gets closer to the beautiful woman he will never forget—whose untimely visit to Shady that fateful Sunday afternoon ended in a killing. A woman who holds the keys to his past…and his future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A teen imprisoned in 1959 for crimes he didn't commit finds bittersweet justice more than 20 years later in Davis's second Southern gothic (after Angel's Rest). Benjamin Purdue grew up the son of a prostitute in Shady Hollow, a remote Blue Ridge Mountains outlaw settlement. He had hope in the form of Amanda Lynn Jennings, a pretty girl with a dangerous secret, but that, like everything else, withers after he shoots a man in self-defense and gets sent to prison for it. In 1980, when Ben gets out of prison, he heads home and discovers the town he remembers has been replaced by a ritzy housing development. Only the cemetery remains with tombstones noting his family members' deaths. Craving answers and longing to find Amanda, he embarks on a harrowing journey of self-discovery. Davis's depiction of Ben's quest to recoup the life stolen from him is enhanced by a gritty first-person narration that's hypnotic and haunting as Ben learns "you can't fence sunshine."
