Sent by the governor to investigate hate crimes in rural Campbell County, Mary Crow finds that hateful words have incited many crimes, and not just against the LGBTQ community. As Mary learns that a number of people have either disappeared or wound up dead, young Chase Buchanan comes forward with a tale about his sister, Samantha. She's gone missing, and Chase insists that his stepfather has sold the girl to get rid of her. The stepfather seems nice enough, though, and Mary chalks the story up to the boy's dislike of his newly blended family and an overactive imagination.
Probing deeper, Mary and Detective Victor Galloway search the county crime statistics and find that the petty crime rate is strangely low, while the murdered and missing cases are spiking. Most puzzling is the fact that so many people die or simply vanish along Highway 74, a road the local Latinos call la carretera de delores. The road of sorrows.
Mary tries as hard, but finds the dots hard to connect in a conservative mountain county suspicious of strangers. After a farewell dinner with Victor Galloway, she winds up her investigation unsatisfied, but hoping she can come up with a report that will mollify the governor. She's driving east, along Highway 74, when the road of sorrows suddenly lives up to its name. A wiggling shadow and a plaintive cry lure Mary into a web of unspeakable evil that stretches from the coves of Campbell County to faraway countries where innocence is sold to the highest bidder.
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ISBN-13
978-1-0879-5491-2 (9781087954912)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, having the good fortune to be raised in a multi-generational family of Southern story-tellers and book readers. In the second grade, I wrote a prize-winning essay about my Chihuahua, Mathilda, and my writing career was launched. My parents gave me a typewriter for Christmas, and I began to churn out one-page mysteries, neighborhood newsletters, dreadful songs (remember, this was Nashville) and even worse poetry. Away from my feverish typing, I joined the Girl Scouts, loved the outdoors and camping, and loved particularly the chills that went down my spine when ghost stories were told around the campfire. I've always loved dogs and horses-Quarter horses and Boxers, especially.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and I'm living in Asheville, North Carolina.
Though I've written all my life-ad copy, a couple of short stories, ghost writing for a children's series--I'd never found my voice, so to speak, as a novelist. Then suddenly, in the midst of these spooky old Appalachian forests, I did. My heroine Mary Crow came to me almost like the goddess Athena, popping out of Zeus's head. I knew what she looked like, how she laughed, what made her angry, who she loved and what moved her to tears. Her story would be as intrinsic to these mountains as her Cherokee people have been for so many generations. I wrote my first Mary Crow novel, "In The Forest of Harm" over the course of a year. I sent it out, got an agent who sold it pretty quickly. I remember my editor saying "You might be on to something here." Well, five books into Mary Crow's adventures, I guess she was right.
Though I've come far and written a lot during those years since I captured the second grade essay prize, at heart I'm still that same kid. I write lousy songs and terrible poetry, but I love the smell of the woods, love to hear a hoot owl in the forest at night, love the chill that an eerie ghost story sends down my spine. If you enjoy those things, too, then take a look my at books. We just might have a lot in common.
