Echoes of the Fall
An Earl Marcus Mystery
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Earl Marcus has faced a litany of demons in his time, but a grisly murder sends him spiraling into a vortex of long-buried secrets.
After losing a hotly contested sheriff's race to the lackey of corrupt politician Jeb Walsh, Earl Marcus has had the worst summer of his life. But worst turns deadly when a body turns up on Earl's front lawn, accompanied by a cryptic letter.
Earl finds a cell phone in the victim's car and tracks it to The Harden School, an old, isolated campus surrounded by barbed wire and locked gates, and catches a sneak peek at a file labeled complaints, where he finds a familiar name: Jeb Walsh. Jeb's ex-wife Eleanor had lodged multiple complaints against the school on behalf of her son, and when he contacts Eleanor, the horrifying truth begins to emerge.
Desperate to make a connection between the school and the dead man, Earl journeys into a world where nothing is sacred.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Early's clever third mystery featuring PI Earl Marcus (after 2018's In the Valley of the Devil), Marcus returns one night to his home in rural Georgia to find a shooting victim, an unidentified young man, in his yard. Marcus embarks on a surreptitious quest, aided by his best friend, Rufus Gribble, to uncover who committed the killing and why. A cellphone in the victim's car leads to the Harden School, an isolated institution whose purpose is gay conversion therapy for troubled teenage boys. Complicating the investigation is the school's connection to Jeb Walsh, a corrupt local politician, white supremacist, and old antagonist of Marcus. The past hangs heavily over the characters, especially Rufus, whose own history becomes entangled with the puzzle, adding depth to a story heavy on psychological introspection. The action builds to the obligatory violent confrontation, but in the end, it's the characters that the reader will remember. Early does a fine job blending crime and the Southern gothic.
