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Summary
Summary
Based on a real-life event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's latest Bell Elkins novel 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.
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 the small town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, it is just another tragedy. It is sad--but these days, depressingly familiar.
But then there is another overdose. And another. And another.
Prosecutor Bell Elkins soon realizes that her Appalachian hometown is facing its starkest challenge yet: a day of constant 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.
Author Notes
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. Julia is the author of the Bell Elkins Novels, beginning with The Devil's Stepdaughter .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Despite its 24-hour timeline, Keller's sixth Bell Elkins novel (after 2016's Sorrow Falls) feels less than urgent. In a plot inspired by a true story, a tainted batch of heroin makes its way through Acker's Gap, W.Va., putting police and paramedics into overtime as dozens of addicts overdose. County prosecutor Bell and Deputy Jake Oakes quickly trace the source and warn a community to which they sometimes turn a blind eye. Procedural readers will be disappointed by the lack of case-changing reveals, but they may be assuaged by Keller's skill in depicting the strained relationship between a realistic but unjaded law enforcement team and those whom they could but don't generally prosecute, while treating all the players with human compassion. Keller keeps a core series theme-deep connections in a small multigenerational community-strong by bringing in old family secrets through a secondary plot focusing on child abuse and dramatic developments in Bell's relationship with her ex-felon sister. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A macabre 24 hours discloses a world of pain for Raythune County, West Virginia.Acker's Gap, the county seat, embodies all that's gone wrong in Appalachia. The loss of dangerous but well-paying coal mining jobs has sunk many of the residents into an apathy so deep it can be relieved only for short periods by the cheap heroin flooding the area. Just after midnight, sheriff's deputy Jake Oakes, arriving at the local gas station, finds a young woman near death from an overdose. Bell Elkins, the county's tough chief prosecutor, is a local who came home eight years ago to make a difference (Sorrow Road, 2016, etc.). But now she's seriously considering a proposal from a law school friend to become a partner in a new firm in D.C. Bell refuses to let her love affair go anywhere, and the hopeless poverty and drug abuse surrounding her is getting her down. The night brings more and more reports of overdoses. Most victims are treated with Narcan and recover, but several die, including the first woman, who came from a loving family, and a wealthy lawyer. Once they learn that the heroin has been cut with a fatal dose of elephant tranquilizer, the sheriff's department and EMT squads race with death as they treat more overdoses and scramble to find the local distributor. In the morning, Bell's sister, Shirley, who served a jail sentence for killing their abusive father, tries to meet with her following a discussion with pastor Paul Wolford to discuss two life-changing secrets she's been harboring. The passing hours gradually reveal the pain, suffering, indifference, and duplicity of people who will do dangerous and illegal things to stay afloat. Although Bell's not religious, a hymn a friend recites to her brings her a moment of peace that looks depressingly short-lived. Keller's prose is so pure that her exploration of the desperate scourge of drugs and poverty and her forecast of a grim future for her heroine are a joy to read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Prosecutor Bell Elkins has fought the scourge of drug addiction in Acker's Gap, West Virginia, for years. Then, on a single day, the problem peaks after a batch of heroin laced with toxic carfentanil causes multiple overdoses and several deaths. More than one authority figure voices the problem, but many think that people who use drugs have no one but themselves to blame. But those whose job is to protect the populace still work feverishly to find the local dealer and spread the word about the bad heroin. In the midst of this crisis, Bell's sister, Shirley, has vital secrets to share; a damaged vet fights to keep his young daughter in his life; feelings grow between a deputy and an EMT; and a compassionate pastor confronts his failings. Keller's series featuring Bell Elkins is remarkable for its humanity and its fully realized characters, Bell foremost among them. Here two of the people who matter most to Elkins her daughter, Carla, and Elkins' lover, Clay appear only in brief text messages, as Bell focuses on the problems at hand and her own future, with a stunning revelation in the closing pages leaving only questions. Keller's finely honed prose and emotional depth mark this series as exceptional in the world of crime fiction.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
?? THE EAST TEXAS natives in Attica Locke's BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), Highway 59 is the lifeline that both links their towns and provides an escape route from them. Darren Mathews, a righteous Texas Ranger who comes from a deep-rooted family of black professional men, "men of stature and purpose," knows every truckstop hamlet from Laredo to Texarkana. But he is currently on suspension, and "without the badge, he was just a black man traveling the highway alone." Lawful or otherwise, Darren's help is needed up in Lark, where the bodies of a white woman and a black man were fished out of the muddy waters of the Attoyac Bayou. The town turns out to be a piñata of quirky characters, like the local sheriff, who lives in a replica of Monticello. (His dog lives in a replica of the White House.) Just about everyone in Lark patronizes Geneva Sweet's Sweets, a cafe that displays treasured objets like "Texas license plates going back 50 years." Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style. Given the characters in her novel, that voice comes naturally. Geneva's deceased husband, Joe "Petey Pie" Sweet, was a session man and "a devil on the guitar" who played with great bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Bobby "Blue" Bland. And every juice house and icehouse, as bars are known around here, loads up the jukebox with country blues. But there's also music in the private thoughts of a man like Darren. "He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead ... and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees." As for the murder mystery, it's tied up with buried feelings and secret betrayals that cross racial lines and go back generations. "There were things you just didn't do in Lark, Texas," Locke tells us. "And picking apart bloodlines was one of them." So enjoy your stay in Lark; but don't ask anyone "Who's your daddy?" and expect to get out of town alive. THE GREAT port of London is churning with activity in Anne Perry's latest Victorian mystery, AN ECHO OF MURDER (Ballantine, $28). On the lookout for trouble, Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police keeps his eyes peeled on the mighty ships passing through. But he isn't prepared for the gruesome scene of murder that greets him in a dockside warehouse. The horridly mutilated victim is a Hungarian merchant, one of a growing populace of displaced persons fleeing oppression in European cities like Budapest and Vienna, only to stir up antagonism in their new home. "They're different, that's all," says a newspaper dealer who bristles at all the "foreign newspapers." Perry fashions a rich, if bloodsplattered narrative from this chapter of history. As the murders continue, Monk and his clever wife, Hester, a nurse who saw plenty of savagery in the Crimea, struggle to fathom the new climate of hatred. "I think it's fear," Hester says. "It's fear of ideas, things that aren't the way you're used to. Everyone you don't understand because their language is different, their food, but above all their religion." How times haven't changed. PART POLICE PROCEDURAL and part travelogue, Cay Rademacher's MURDEROUS MISTRAL (Minotaur, $24.99) is a perfect getaway mystery. This tightly-plotted whodunit (briskly translated from the German by Peter Millar) uproots Capitaine Roger Blanc from his prestigious office in the Paris gendarmerie to the Midi, "the graveyard of any career," where he has inherited a run-down 18th-century stone house. Blanc soon finds out that "Parisian ruthlessness didn't quite work down here." Nor does Parisian pride, which gets clobbered when he starts interviewing slippery local suspects in the murder of an inept gangster. The detective-as-outsider convention works really well in humanizing Blanc, whom the elegant women in the district find especially amusing. The backbreaking restoration work earns him sympathy, as does his first exposure to the slashing winds of the region's infamous mistral. By the time Blanc is presented with his second murder case, he's ready to admit that his new home in the countryside is more stimulating than he'd thought. JULIA KELLER DOESN'T pull any punches in FAST FALLS THE NIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99). In the course of a single day, there are 33 overdoses (three of them fatal) in Aker's Gap, the Appalachian town in West Virginia where she sets all her regional mysteries. The putative cause of this horrendous business is a batch of tainted heroin - heroin being "as common as stray cats around here." But Bell Elkins, a county prosecutor and the protagonist in this series, knows that the problem goes deeper, to a "circular logic of despair" created by shuttered coal mines, exacerbated by zero replacement job options, and resulting in the kind of hopelessness from which there's no recovery. The plot pretty much consists of waiting for the next OD victim to keel over, but Keller does a terrific job of rubbing our faces in the troubles of her hometown - of America's hometowns. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Library Journal Review
The tightly interwoven community of -Acker's Gap, WV, will never experience another 24 hours like this day. Drugs have caused a problem before, but now a batch of heroin laced with a toxic substance is wreaking particular devastation. As many in the area overdose or die, the race is on for county prosecutor Bell Elkins, the sheriff, and the EMTs who frantically rush to save lives and identify the local dealer. As people's stories emerge amid the tragedy, we learn about a burgeoning interracial romantic relationship, a damaged veteran who painfully yearns to parent his young daughter, and a kind pastor who is not quite what he seems. Bell's sister, Shirley, who served time for killing their father, also shares a tale, one that leads to a stunning, life-altering discovery for Bell. VERDICT Keller (Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Writing; Summer of the Dead) tackles the current national opioid epidemic in an economically ravaged Appalachian region. This outstanding, taut mystery presents an important social issue with compassion and great humanity. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]-Gloria Drake, Oswego P.L. Dist., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.