Murder breaks through the racial divide that separates two teenage girls, forging an unlikely friendship in this Southern debut that’s perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and If the Creek Don’t Rise.
Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.
Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she’s holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see.
As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.
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“In prose that is stunning and assured, Kelly Mustian forges a powerful story of two young women, thrust together after unspeakable loss and devastation, and their courageous struggle to emerge from their darkest hours.”
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Jessica Keener, author of Strangers in Budapest