Dream with Little Angels - (Alvin, Alabama Novel) by Michael Hiebert (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1975, thirteen-year-old Ruby Mae Vickers disappears in Alvin, Alabama. Leah Teal, new detective of Alvin, is assigned to the case. After three months, Ruby Mae finally turns up dead beneath a willow beside a swamp. Twelve years later, another little girl goes missing. Then another. Leah is sure these incidents are connected to the one she failed to solve a dozen years ago. The job of finding them again falls to Leah. She's not prepared for the memories it drags up. Then Leah's own daughter joins the list of missing girls. Told from the point of view of Leah's eleven-year-old son Abe, this is a tense and moving story of one woman's search for the truth and justice as she struggles against a past that won't let her go.

Book Synopsis

Michael Hiebert's remarkable debut novel tells the riveting story of a small southern town haunted by tragedy, one brave woman's struggle to put a troubling mystery to rest--and its impact on the sensitive boy who comes of age in the midst of it all. . .

Abe Teal wasn't even born when Ruby Mae Vickers went missing twelve years ago. Few people in Alvin, Alabama, talk about the months spent looking for her, or about how Ruby Mae's lifeless body was finally found beneath a willow tree. Even Abe's mom, Leah, Alvin's only detective, has avoided the subject. But now, another girl is missing.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Dailey took the bus home from school as usual, then simply vanished. Townsfolk comb the dense forests and swampy creeks to no avail. Days later, Tiffany Michelle Yates disappears. Abe saw her only hours before, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a pink dress.

Observant and smart, Abe watches his mother battle small-town bureaucracy and old resentments, desperate to find both girls and quietly frantic for her own children's safety. As the search takes on a terrifying urgency, Abe traverses the shifting ground between innocence and hard-won understanding, eager to know and yet fearing what will be revealed.

Dream with Little Angels is by turns lyrical, heartbreaking, and shocking--a brilliantly plotted novel of literary suspense and of the dark shadows, painful secrets, and uncompromising courage in one small town.

"One of the best books I've read in a long, long while." --Lisa Jackson, New York Times bestselling author

About the Author

Michael Hiebert is a two-time winner of the prestigious Surrey International Writer's Conference Storyteller's Award and has been published in The Best American Mystery Series, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. His first novel, Dream with Little Angels was published to much critical acclaim. Michael was born and raised and still lives in British Columbia, Canada. Visit him at michaelhiebert.com.