Publisher's Weekly Review
The scents of Lavender and regret are heavy in this suspenseful coming-of-age novel centering on two generations of rural Kentucky women-and those unlucky enough to become enmeshed in their lives-from Edgar-winner Roy (Bent Road). The devastating tale alternates between chapters set in 1936 narrated by Sarah Crowley and chapters set in 1952 from the third-person perspective of teenage Annie Holleran, whom Sarah has been raising as her daughter. But the key figure, never heard from directly, is Juna, Sarah's younger sister (and Annie's birth mother), a seductive, sinister force responsible for sending one man to the gallows and a boy to his death. Gifted (or cursed) with Juna's startling black eyes and a sixth sense country folk call "the know-how," the spirited Annie has been making nearly everyone uneasy for as long as she can remember. Annie's discovery of a dead body on a neighboring farm leads to the unearthing of long-buried, still-dangerous secrets. This powerful story inspired by the last legal public hanging in the U.S. should transfix readers right up to its stunning final twist. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Someone will return, and someone will die; that's foretold when the rocking chair on Annie Holleran's porch rocks by itself. It's Annie's ascension (her 15-and-a-half-years birthday), and she has gone next door to peer down the Baines' well to see the image of her true love. Hollerans and Baines aren't meant to mix since Annie's Aunt Juna's accusations made Joseph Carl Baines the county's last official hanged man. But using the Baines' well, as tradition dictates, is Annie's only hope of secretly glimpsing her future husband. Instead of a future lover, Annie finds Cora Baines' body and knows the prickling sensation she has been feeling wasn't excitement about her ascension; it's a warning from her know-how (a sort of spirit connection) that something is coming. Is it her birth mother, Aunt Juna, returning to rain down more evil? Or is it one of the Baines brothers returning for revenge? Annie's know-how warns that the past is rising up, and she sets to sorting out the time-muddled truth in hopes of warding off tragedy. Roy easily reaches back in time to conjure small-town Kentucky of 1936 and 1952, as Annie and her adoptive mother reveal the aftermath of a young boy's mysterious death. Edgar winner Roy's third novel (following Until She Comes Home, 2013) is an atmospheric, vividly drawn tale that twists her trademark theme of family secrets with the crackling spark of the know-how for a suspenseful, ghost-story feel.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
OPEN LET ME DIE IN HIS FOOTSTEPS (Dutton, $26.95) anywhere and Lori Roy's melodious voice will float off the page, calling your attention to the way honeybees are soothed into a kind of stupor by the scent of lavender, or instructing you in the wisdom of hanging milk snakes by the front door to keep away evil. And when the teller of this Southern Gothic yarn really wants to engage your mind, her insinuating voice will direct you to the last public hanging held in the United States and a lingering curse on the Kentucky farming town that hosted the spectacle in the early dawn of a cold, damp day in 1936. Family feuds are nurtured for generations in these parts, and there's been bad blood between the Baines and the Hollerans ever since Juna Crowley, of the Holleran clan, accused one of the seven Baine brothers of rape, a hanging offense in 1936. Roy recounts the execution itself in disturbing detail, but being more attentive to the social dynamics that led up to it, she uses a split-focus narrative to trace the original murderous grudge back to its roots. Like her grandmother and her Aunt Juna, Annie Holleran is touched with "the know-how" to foresee future events. In 1952, Annie is exactly midway between the ages of 15 and 16, and like all girls at that very special age, she'll peer down a well at midnight, hoping to see the reflection of her intended husband. But being a rebellious girl with a will of her own, Annie is determined to use the well on forbidden Baine property. Lest anyone think this is turning into a sweet coming-of-age story, Annie's younger sister beats her to the well, effectively stealing her husband. Caught up in their quarrel, the sisters practically stumble over the body of old Mrs. Baine, who lived alone on the farm after driving off her sons. All the mysteries bedeviling Annie in 1952 are gradually revealed in spellbinding flashbacks to 1936, when her unhappy mother and her notorious aunt committed sins that will haunt their descendants. This Depression-era story is a sad one, written in every shade of Gothic black. But its true colors emerge in the rich textures of the narrative, and in the music of that voice, as hypnotic as the scent coming off a field of lavender. WE'LL NEVER KNOW what the first three days on the Beautiful Dreamer were like, but when Sarah Lotz's satirical scream of a novel, DAY FOUR (Little, Brown, $26), opens, the cruise ship is figuratively dead on course for the Bermuda Triangle. A fire has broken out in the engine room, and the chief engineer is too badly burned to stay at his post. For some mysterious reason, the ship's S O S messages have gone unanswered, and by Day 5, the ship has lost all power, and a raging norovirus is taking its toll on the passengers. And what an unlovely group they are: the happy-slappy Australian cruise director; two friends who have made a suicide pact; a "sick, manipulative con artist" who develops true psychic abilities; and assorted ghosts. Oh, and a killer named Gary. If this tub ever makes it back to Miami, sign me up for the next cruise. "I'D BE DELIGHTED," replies John Delahunt, a student at Trinity College, when the young socialite Helen Stokes asks him to accompany her to a hanging. That colorful street entertainment is one of many striking set pieces in THE CONVICTIONS OF JOHN DELAHUNT (Pegasus, $24.95), a remarkable first novel that Andrew Hughes has set in 1840s Dublin and based on crimes of that period. The lovely Helen seems the perfect mate for Delahunt, who was executed, for killing a little boy, in full view of a mob of 10,000 souls in 1842. Hughes challenges historical accounts of Delahunt's infamous career with an incisive portrait of an impoverished scholar lured into becoming a paid police informant. Urged by his corrupt handlers to bring them murderers (the big money is always in murder), he starts framing innocent people and then, in desperation, begins committing crimes himself. At once a close character study and a sweeping panorama of the era of "dissectionists" who buy bodies for medical research and the "resurrectionists" who dig them up, this fascinating book is a stirring work of fiction and a perceptive chapter in Ireland's social history. ELOUISE (LOU) NORTON, in Rachel Howzell Hall's SKIES OF ASH (Forge/Tom Doherty, $25.99), doesn't talk like most detectives in police procedurals. She curses and complains like all the other cops on the L.A.P.D. homicide squad, but her voice has a coarse, raggedy edge that, as a not-so-tough black woman in a tough man's nasty job, she's acquired the hard way. Lou doesn't exactly see things the same way her colleagues do, either, especially her young, "white boy" partner from Colorado. On one of those mornings when Lou and her sexy but unfaithful husband are trying to decide whether they want to start a fight, Lou is called to an arson fire, with casualties, in Baldwin Hills. On her way to the scene, she drives through the rough streets of her bullet-scarred old neighborhood, checking out the "stumbling crackheads,... gangbanging drug dealers,... storefront payday check-advance scams," as well as the liquor store where her sister was murdered. Lou's history is wrapped up in this neighborhood, and because she lugs around her personal baggage wherever she goes, it both drags her down and makes her a formidable fighter - someone you want on your side.
Kirkus Review
Roy (Bent Road, 2011, etc.) draws a Faulkner-ian tale of sex and violence from the Kentucky hills. In scenes alternating between 1936 and 1952and with points of view shifting and mirroringtwo women live with a gift for foretelling, what they call the know-how. "It floats just above the lavender bushes, trickles from the moss hanging from the oaks...waiting for someone like Annie or Aunt Juna to scoop it or snatch it or pluck it from the air." Juna disappeared after her testimony led to Joseph Carl Baines being hanged in '36 for murder. As the book opens, Annie Holleran is trapped in a country superstition about her future husband's face being reflected by well water on her 15th half-birthday"her day of ascension." In fact, there's as much about who loves whom here as about the Holleran-Baines blood feud ignited by Joseph Carl's hanging. Willful ignorance, and the nature of the supposed crime, meant a rush to judgment, but only deep into the haunted tale come hints that Juna's know-how disguises a darker trait. Roy's characters live whole on the page, especially Annie, all gawky girl stumbling her way to womanhood through prejudice and inhibition; the widowed female sheriff, her husband's successor, who announces the prisoner's death: "On her head sits a simple blue hat she might wear to a wedding or a funeral"; Juna's sister, Sarah, who aches for Ellis Baine; and the girls' widowed daddy, who "has a way of balling himself up when he's drinking regular, almost like he's wanting to altogether disappear." As three generations struggle with deception and death, there's much ado about lavenderin kitchens, in sachets, in bread and tea, symbolizing devotionin this tale driven by something stranger. A sure winner with fans of backwoods country noir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The last lawful public hanging in the United States, held in Owensboro, KY, in 1936, provides the inspiration for this atmospheric suspense novel. The story opens with Annie Holleran sneaking away to her neighbor's well in the dead of night. Local folklore holds that if you look into a well at midnight, you will see the reflection of your future husband. But for Annie, the events of that evening have far-reaching consequences. There's a rift between Annie's family and the Baines family next door-a gulf that dates back to when Annie's Aunt Juna, a dark-eyed beauty, cast a spell over the Baines boys. Roy's tale moves back and forth in time between Annie's experiences in 1952 and those of her mother, Sarah, and Juna in 1936 when one of the Baines sons was accused of a terrible crime. VERDICT In her third novel (after the Edgar Award-winning Bent Road and the Edgar-nominated Until She Comes Home) Roy describes life on a lavender farm in rural Kentucky in vivid detail, and the mystery of what happened years ago will keep readers engaged until the end. Her engaging story of young love, Southern folklore, family feuds, and crimes of passion is bound to satisfy readers who enjoy Southern fiction and coming-of-age tales. [See Prepub Alert, 12/8/14; Dutton is pushing to breakout Roy with extensive marketing.-Ed.]-Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2015 Lori Roy 1 1952 -- Annie Annie Holleran hears him before she sees him. Even over the drone of the cicadas, she knows it's Ryce Fulkerson, and he's pedaling this way. That's his bike, all right, creaking and whining. He'll have turned off the main road and will be standing straight up as he uses all his weight, bobbing side to side, to pump those pedals and force that bike up and over the hill. In a few moments, he'll reach the top where the ground levels out, and that front tire of his will be wobbling and groaning and drawing a crooked line in the soft, dry dirt. They're singing in the trees again today, those cicadas. A week ago, they clawed their way out of the ground, seventeen years' worth of them, and now their skins hang from the oaks, hardened husks with tiny claws and tiny, round heads. One critter called out to another and then another until their pulsing songs made Annie press both hands over her ears, tuck her head between her knees, and cry out for them to stop. Stop it now. All these many days, there's been something in the air, a spark, a crackle, something that's felt a terrible lot like trouble coming, and it's been much like the weight of those cicadas, thousands upon thousands of them crying out to one another. Annie has known all morning Ryce would be coming. It's why she's been sitting on this step and waiting on him for near an hour. She oftentimes knows a thing is coming before it has come. It's part of the curse--or blessing, if Grandma is to be believed--of having the know-how. They both have the know-how, Annie and Aunt Juna. That's what Grandma calls it. The know-how. It floats just above the lavender bushes, trickles from the moss hanging in the oaks, drifts like a fallen leaf down the Lone Fork River, just waiting for someone like Annie or Aunt Juna to scoop it or snatch it or pluck it from the air. The two of them share the know-how because Aunt Juna is Annie's real mother. Grandma has it too. She says there's no evil in the know-how, though some are frightened of a thing they know little about. It's my gift to you, Grandma is all the time saying, but that's not true. The know-how passes from mother to daughter. Everyone knows that. Annie also has Aunt Juna's black eyes. Not dark brown or almost black. But black , through and through. Folks believe that's where the evil lives. In the eyes. It's Annie's fear, has been all her life, that evil passes from mother to daughter too. Most days the know-how is like a whisper or a sigh, but with the approach of Annie's half birthday--her day of ascension, they call it--the know-how has swelled, and this something in the air has made Annie startle for no reason, hold her breath when she thought she'd heard something she ought not have heard. All her years, fifteen and a half of them when she celebrates her day of ascension tomorrow, Annie Holleran has lived with the fear of turning out like her Aunt Juna. All her years, Annie has lived with the fear that Aunt Juna will one day come home. Pushing herself off the bottom step and not bothering to smooth her skirt or straighten her blouse, Annie walks into the middle of the drive, kicking up dust with her bare feet. With every step, her middle caves and her shoulders slouch, Annie's favored posture since she sprouted last summer. That's what Mama called it . . . sprouting. And ever since, Mama has been telling Annie to stand straight and show some pride, as if being taller than most every other girl should be a prideful thing. In addition to nagging about improper posture, Mama will be after Annie with soap and a rag by lunchtime, and she'll remind Annie no more going barefoot once a girl has ascended. "Thought you'd be working today," Annie says as Ryce's bike slows to a stop. She crosses her arms and hugs herself, another way to shrink an inch or two. Ryce kicks out his right leg and lets his bike tip until he's carrying his weight on that one foot. He's wearing dark trousers, one leg rolled up to his shin so it doesn't catch in his chain, double-knotted leather boots, and a white undershirt covered in the same dark smudges that mar his forearms, hands, and face. "Lunch break," Ryce says. He's holding on to his handlebar with one hand. In the other, he holds a crumpled white kerchief. "All the fellows get one." This is the summer Ryce will buy himself a truck. He said the same last summer, but his daddy put all the money Ryce earned setting tobacco and picking worms in the bank and said college was but a few years away and it damn sure didn't pay for itself. "You come here expecting I'd feed you?" As has happened so often in the past days and weeks, the nasty words pop out before Annie can stop them. She crosses her arms. In addition to shaving another inch off her frame, this is also a fine way of hiding her chest so Ryce won't notice it's not one bit bigger than the last time he saw her. No matter what he says, Annie catches Ryce sometimes staring. "Didn't come expecting no food," Ryce says, studying that crumpled kerchief like it's something important. "Come to see if you was going tonight." "Might. Might not." "What does that mean? 'Might. Might not.' " "Might not want to." "You ought want to go," Ryce says. The sun has lightened his hair a shade or two, and now it's the exact same color as his pale-brown eyes. Sometimes, Annie catches herself staring too. "Says who?" Annie asks. "Every girl, that's who," Ryce says, tugging on the edges of that kerchief. He's got something wrapped up inside, and because of the way he's using only his fingertips, it must be some kind of treasure to him. When, several days ago, Annie first noticed the spark in the air, Grandma had smoothed the tangles in Annie's ordinary yellow hair, given her a squirt of lavender-scented lotion to rub into her hands and elbows, and said not to worry. That spark was not a sign of trouble-to-come. No, indeed. That spark signaled the arrival of the lavender. Annie is almost of age, midway between fifteen and sixteen, and so is finally coming into her own. She's ascending into womanhood, though she prefers to think she's ascending into adulthood. "Womanhood" makes her think of the wide-bottomed women who sit in church, tissues always in hand to wipe clean the noses of whatever children crawl across their laps. "Adulthood" sounds not so confining as "womanhood." All kinds of yearning come with a girl's ascension--so says Grandma--beautiful, glorious yearning that will twist up a girl's insides, wring them this way and that. Seeing as she has the know-how, Annie will feel things now she's never before felt. She'll feel things the ordinary girls will not. The arrival of the lavender is only one of them. Acres of it grow around Grandma's house, acres and acres, and the sweet smell has been gathering since last year's crop was cut. There is coming, Grandma said, a single moment when those flowers, rows and rows, mounds and mounds, will explode into full bloom. Yearning, Grandma had said. You'll soon know much about yearning. Ryce is right about one thing: All the girls in Hayden County look forward to midnight of the day halfway between their fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. They buy special nightgowns and new cotton robes. They stay up late to curl their hair and dab on a coat of pink lipstick, and as midnight approaches, these girls of Hayden County sneak out of their houses, travel to the nearest well, usually the well at the Fulkersons' place, and peek down into it in hopes of seeing the reflection of their intended. They huddle around the well, the girl who will that very night ascend and her best friends or closest relations, while their mamas and daddies stand at a distance, smoking a cigar or sipping whiskey from a coffee cup. The mamas will call out, because it's the m mas who worry most about who their girls will marry, "Who you see down there?" The girls will giggle, squint into the darkness, wave their flashlights in one another's eyes, and call out the name of a favorite boy. "Could ride up here after supper, if you want," Ryce says. "After everyone's in bed. Your bike working? We could ride down together." "Why would I want that, Ryce Fulkerson?" Ryce's daddy is the sheriff, and before that, his granddaddy was sheriff, and hand to God, his grandma too, which makes Ryce think he'll be sheriff one day. It makes Ryce think he's more of a man than he really is. "Just offering," he says. "Thought you might not want to make the trip alone." For the past ten years, most every girl has made her way to the Fulkersons' on her day of ascension. Mrs. Fulkerson makes a big show of keeping up the well at their place. In the spring, she plants marigolds around it, and in the winter, she makes Ryce shovel a path through the snow. Sheriff Fulkerson has even been known to pace nearby as a girl looks into the well, one hand resting on the handgun hanging at his waist because a person never knows what might happen when the spirits are being conjured. Even though it's dark, he'll wear his hat and march back and forth because nothing is more important than the virtue of the young women of Hayden County. Then he'll share a sip of whiskey with the dads and uncles and whoever else may have come to bear witness. Grandma says they never had such pageantry in her day and doesn't much appreciate the sheriff making light of tradition. Daddy says there isn't a thing wrong with a bit of pageantry or a good shot of whiskey. "Not such a long trip if I go to the Baines' place," Annie says, nodding up toward the tobacco barn at the top of the rise behind her house. "There's a perfectly fine well right up there. Still got water in it, so I hear." Everyone knows there's only one thing beyond the Hollerans' place, and that's the Baines' place. Everyone also knows Hollerans don't go near Baines. Aunt Juna was the start of all the hatred between the families, and even though she's been gone a good many years, the hatred has stayed put. Juna Crowley is a legend. She's the one the girls sing about as their jump ropes slap hot concrete. Over and over the girls of Hayden County chant . . . Eyes like coal, she'll lead you astray . . . How many Baines will die this day? And the ropes swing around and around until their fibers turn frayed and prickly to the touch. Last summer, Dorothy Howard visited her grandma in Topeka, Kansas, and she said even those girls all the way up there were singing about Juna Crowley. One Baine, two Baines, one hundred and four Baines, those Topeka girls chanted. And if they're chanting in Topeka, they must be chanting all over the country. Course, there were, are, only seven Baine brothers. No telling how many are still alive. Aunt Juna killed only one of them. Some twenty years ago, she saw to it Joseph Carl hanged by his neck until dead, and all these many years later, Browerton is still the town known for--known only for--being the town to last hang a man in plain sight for all to see. Just last month, Arleen Kellerman caught three of her grandsons, who were visiting from Atlanta, Georgia, as they were about to kick the box out from under the neighbor boy. The rope was strung up over the pole that holds one end of her clothesline, the other end anchored to the side of her house. Every one of those boys got whipped. The one dressed up as Aunt Juna got the worst of it. "Your daddy ain't going to let you go to the Baines' place," Ryce says, smiling in a way that lets Annie know she's a damn fool for saying such a thing. "Your mama ain't going to allow that either." "What makes you think I care what my daddy says? Or my mama?" "Don't think you should go to the Baines' place, that's all." Still holding on to that kerchief, Ryce rolls his bike backward a few feet until he can see around the side of the house. He'll be wondering if a person can see the Baine place from here, but he won't be able to. He won't see it unless he runs up the hill behind the house and past Grandpa's tobacco barn. From there, he would see the rock fence that separates the two places, and he'd also see the well. And he might see old Cora Baine, the only Baine left, sitting in her rocker, a shotgun cradled in her lap. It's only been a week since school let out and Annie last saw Ryce, but already he looks different, bigger, taller, thicker somehow. The neck of his undershirt is stretched from him having used it as a kerchief all morning. He'll have been tugging it up over his mouth, even chewing on it until it droops and frays. It's a nasty habit, and his mama will get on him for it when he goes home for supper. And while the neck of that undershirt sags, the rest of it is all the sudden too small. It pulls across his chest and looks to be cutting him under the arms. His jawline has squared off some since school ended, and his nose has sprawled, no longer has the ball on the end that the women of town were all the time tweaking. Or maybe it's his over-grown hair. Hanging down past his ears, it slims him out in the face, and his skin is darker for having been out in the sun all day every day for a week. Damn it all, Annie looks just the same. The spark that has nagged at Annie all these days has been like the ache in her legs that Mama calls growing pains or the stings that speckle Annie's calves when she gets into a patch of nettles. It's made her irritable, disagreeable, most especially with Ryce Fulkerson. When Annie told Grandma that her yearning felt nothing like a yearning should feel and that she didn't much like it, Grandma smiled, even laughed. She laughed harder still when Annie said she most certainly did not yearn for Ryce Fulkerson because he was a gosh-darn fool, when what she really wanted to say was that he was a Goddamn fool, but Annie knew better than to curse in front of Grandma. This made Grandma throw her head back and laugh right out loud. Annie would have stomped away from anyone else who laughed that way, but not Grandma. Grandma's laugh made Annie want to cry because the yearning and the coming of the lavender and the feeling that something was lurking and not wanting to turn evil like Aunt Juna had stuffed her full and there was no room left. Grandma knew this and stopped her laughing, stroked one hand over Annie's cheek, and said this is exactly how a yearning should feel. "I suppose I'll be going where I please and if I please," Annie says, and this time she feels the nastiness coming but can't stop herself from spitting it out. "One thing's for certain. I damn sure won't be seeing you down in that well." "Course you won't," Ryce says. "Lizzy Morris already seen me. Don't suppose a man can be a husband to two women. Don't suppose he'd want to." At the mention of Lizzy Morris, Annie turns on one bare heel and walks toward the kitchen. Lizzy Morris is one of those girls whose hair is always brushed, pulled back, and tied off with a bow, a Goddamn bow. Isn't that Lizzy Morris a lovely girl, Mama is all the time saying when they happen upon Lizzy at the café or in church or at the market. "I figure that's a good thing then," Annie turns and says. "Hate to think you'd grow old alone." Then she marches on toward the house. "Hey," Ryce calls out. "Hold up. I brought this for you." Annie takes a few steps back toward Ryce. He smells of wet dirt and soggy leaves. Been pulling tobacco from the beds, most likely. "Thought it might be helpful." He smiles and nods, urging her to come closer. When she's within arm's reach, he gives the crumpled kerchief a shake and something drops in Annie's palm. "What on earth is this, Ryce Fulkerson?" But Annie knows what it is. She knows exactly what it is. She already has the same hidden up in her top drawer just behind her Sunday stockings. It's the white, shriveled body of a dead frog. "Not that I think you'll need it," Ryce says. "But just in case." Annie closes her hand around the chalky body and swivels on that same bare heel. She must have told Ryce about the dead frog; otherwise he'd have never known. Men, boys, don't have the know-how. He means for her to grind it into a fine white powder and sprinkle it on the head of whatever boy she sees down in that well tonight. The powder of a dead frog will make the boy love her even if he isn't inclined toward Annie, which is likely because as hard as Annie tries to say her pleases and thank-yous like Mama is all the time insisting on, and as hard as Annie tries to brush her hair and wear clean clothes and smile the way her sister, Caroline, does, and as much as she tries not to look a person straight on with her black eyes because they have a way of frightening folks, most people are still not inclined toward her. This dead frog will make her intended love her despite her being doomed to turn out just like Aunt Juna. Squeezing her fist as tightly as she can, Annie crushes the small body and lets the bits and pieces drop at her feet. "I damn sure won't be coming to your place tonight, Ryce Fulkerson," she says, then walks up the stairs, across the porch, and inside without looking back. Excerpted from Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.