The fire woke the whole block, but only one boy ran toward it. At three in the morning, the old brick clubhouse looked less like a building and more like...
Part 1 By 1873, people in the mountains of eastern Kentucky had learned two kinds of silence. There was the ordinary kind, the kind that came with winter dusk, with...
By the time Elina Rays reached Room 108, the pain behind her eyes had turned the hallway lights into white knives, but even through the migraine, even through the blur...
The Sinking Creek Covenant Part I Long before West Virginia had a name of its own, when it was still a hard western shoulder of Virginia and the law traveled...
Rain always sounded meaner in Riverton. It did not tap politely against glass or patter soft over rooftops the way people in cleaner towns liked to describe it. In Riverton,...
Part 1 In the winter of 1842, Harland County, Kentucky, was the kind of place a map could not truly hold. A line could be drawn around it. Ink could...
The Black Widow of Greenbrier Part I By the time people in Greenbrier County learned to lower their voices when they said Martha Dilling’s name, three men were already gone....
“I’M PREGNANT,” SHE WHISPERED—AND THE DUKE SHATTERED HIS GLASS BECAUSE HE KNEW SOMEONE HAD STOLEN 10 YEARS OF HIS LIFE “Liar.” The word tore out of the Duke of Westmore...
By the time the blood on the highway started to dry, most of Havenwood had already decided who Jackson Ryder was, and almost none of them had been there to...
By the time Maya Sterling ran across the gas station lot, she had already learned the ugliest lesson a frightened person can learn. Terror did not always arrive wearing a...