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Here’s the best thing about Julia Keller’s “A Killing in the Hills”: After you read it, there are seven more novels waiting in the series.
Photo Above: by Julia Keller. Minotaur Books, 2012. 364pp.
They’re classified in the “murder mystery” category—but Keller’s books defy genre limitations. Reading the Bell Elkins series places you in the company of the best novelists working today, with a lead character who does a lot more than solve mysteries and knows Appalachia like the back of her hand.
Keller was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist before she began writing fiction, and she knows how to zero in on details and stay true to facts. The novel opens with Elkins’ adolescent daughter Carla sitting in a diner, irritated by the three old men at an adjoining table (“All old men looked alike, right?”). Carla has just left her court-mandated Teen Anger Management Workshop, and her mother, Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Bell Elkins, is late picking her up. Again.
What happens to those three old men sets in motion a series of events that spins for hundreds of pages and leaves you knowing a place and its people intimately. Suspects and subplots weave an intricate pattern—none of them contrived or predictable. (Promise: the ending of this novel is a complete surprise.)
Julia Keller was ahead of the crowd in writing about the deadly impact of opioids in impoverished mountain towns, and everything she writes is true. But it’s character, friendship, family and justice that shape this novel—not drugs, murders and car chases. Read Keller’s West Virginia series for the suspense—but also for the humanity it reflects over and over again.
A Killing in These Hills by Julia Keller. Minotaur Books, 2012. 364pp.
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2023 issue.
