Ransom Burning

A decade after fleeing tragedy, an award-winning journalist finally returns to his hometown to face head-on the dark past he tried to outrun.

Inspired by true events, James Markert’s Ransom Burning is rich with multilayered characters and small-town intrigue, perfect for fans of Wiley Cash’s A Land More Kind Than Home and Liz Moore’s Long Bright River.

It’s 1974, and Los Angeles Times reporter Hunter Dreary returns to his hometown of Ransom, Kentucky, when he hears his autistic younger brother, Wally, is in trouble. But when he arrives at the sheriff’s office, Hunter is the one facing an interrogation after Wally accidentally reveals details from an infamous night in the town’s history—details that lead the sheriff straight to a body buried in the woods. 

The discovery brings back memories of St. Anthony’s first state basketball championship a decade ago and of Lewis Truffant, the Black fifteen-year-old who not only integrated the Catholic high school earlier in the year but hit the game-winning shot. But it also dredges up what most townspeople had hoped to forget, that by sunrise the next day, Lewis had been found hanging from a tree, and fires and riots soon followed. The truth of what happened that night has been buried ever since.

Still haunted by Lewis’s death and pushed into action by each new unearthed secret, Hunter, with help from a childhood friend, Annie Tampini, finally starts asking questions of his own. 

But he’s not the only one searching for answers. 

And the painful truth, once exposed, might hold the power to finally bring the corrupt town to its knees.