Bone on Bone - (Bell Elkins) by Julia Keller (Paperback)

About the Book

Bone on Bone, the next powerful chapter in Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's beloved Bell Elkins series, sends readers headlong into the thick of a mystery as young as today's headlines -- but as old as the mountains that hold these lives in a tight grip. How far would you go for someone you love? Would you die? Would you kill? After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly case -- even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own. A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn. Bell has lost her job as prosecutor -- but not her affection for her ragtag, hard-luck hometown. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging.

Book Synopsis

Bone on Bone, the next powerful chapter in Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's beloved Bell Elkins series, sends readers headlong into the thick of a mystery as young as today's headlines -- but as old as the mountains that hold these lives in a tight grip.

How far would you go for someone you love? Would you die? Would you kill? After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly case -- even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own.

A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn.

Bell has lost her job as prosecutor -- but not her affection for her ragtag, hard-luck hometown. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging.

Review Quotes

"This haunting, thought-provoking story proves Keller is one of a kind. Readers of Julia Spencer-Fleming's mysteries of communities torn apart by crime may also want to try." - Library Journal (starred review)

"This thoughtful, painfully empathetic story will long linger in the reader's memory." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Keller can spin a mystery plot with the best of them, but it's her full-bodied characters and the regard they have for one another that really sets her crime fiction apart: a bride's back-of-the-hand caress of her new husband's cheek, and his response, is a moment that will linger in memory long after the crime is solved." - Booklist (starred review)

"A native West Virginian and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize while at the Chicago Tribune, Keller, with a winning blend of lyrical prose and realistic storytelling, again offers readers exceptional crime fiction and a harrowing portrait of the Mountain State. Adrift in poverty, anger and despair and awash in opiates, West Virginia casts a bleak shadow. But in Keller's adroit, unblinking and humane approach, its profound humanity also shines through." - Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

"Compulsively readable and rich with psychological and social insight... Keller emphatically captures a community beset by hardship and caught in a downward spiral that she is determined to break." - National Book Review

About the Author

JULIA KELLER spent twelve years as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, she was born in West Virginia and lives in Chicago and Ohio.