Part of Series
In the next powerful mystery from Julia Keller, a murder investigation leads West Virginia prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins to the shattering truth about her own past. The first drug overdose comes just after midnight, when a young woman dies on the dirty floor of a gas station bathroom. To the people of Acker’s Gap, it is just another tragedy. It is sad—but depressingly familiar. But then there is another overdose. And another. And another. Prosecutor Bell Elkins soon realizes that her Appalachian hometown is facing its grimmest challenge yet: an unprecedented number of heroin overdoses from a batch tainted with a lethal tranquilizer. While the clock ticks and the bodies fall, Bell and her colleagues desperately track the source of the deadly drug—and engage in fierce debates over the wisdom of expending precious resources to save the lives of self-destructive addicts. Based on a real-life event, Fast Falls the Night takes place in a single 24-hour period, unfurling against the backdrop of a shattering personal revelation that will change Bell’s life forever.
Author
Julia was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. She graduated from Marshall University, then later earned a doctoral degree in English Literature at Ohio State University. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton and Ohio State Universities, and the University of Notre Dame. She is a guest essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and has been a contributor on CNN and NBC Nightly News. In 2005, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Julia lives in a high-rise in Chicago and a stone cottage on a lake in rural Ohio.
