Review: Ghost Roll: A Bell Elkins Story by Julia Keller

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 835 KB
• Print Length: 54 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books (June 9 2015)
• Sold by: Macmillan CA
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00S54VUF2

Book Description

 Bell Elkins, prosecuting attorney and small-town heroine of Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Keller's A Killing in the Hills, Bitter River and Summer of the Dead, faces one of her most challenging days in this exclusive digital short story. Featuring an exclusive extract from her new full-length novel Last Ragged Breath.

For Bell Elkins no day is ever the same.

But on this day, for the third day running, Bell has woken up from the same dream. A dream about a boy needing her help, reaching out to her. Bell, always unable to help.

Already unsettled, she becomes embroiled, in her role as prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, in an investigation into a couple running a local day-care centre, and Bell suspects that her day is only going to get worse. A suspicion that is compounded when she's forced to confront a friend's treachery and a ghost from her past.

No day is ever the same, but will Bell be forever changed by this one?

About the Author

 Julia was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. She graduated from Marshall University, then later earned a doctoral degree in English Literature at Ohio State University.

She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton and Ohio State Universities, and the University of Notre Dame. She is a guest essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and has been a contributor on CNN and NBC Nightly News. In 2005, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Julia lives in a high-rise in Chicago and a stone cottage on a lake in rural Ohio.


My Review

 I love the Bell Elkins series by Julia Keller. Julia is one of my go-to authors. I know whatever she writes is going to be good. Ghost Roll will have to hold me over until the release of Last Ragged Breath in August.

The earlier Bell Elkins short stories had explored Bell's past. This one is set in the present. Bell is having dreams featuring a small boy at a window. Who is this boy? What are the dreams trying to tell her. We quickly learn that the small boy is son of the owners of a daycare center that is actually just a front, a money laundering enterprise, for selling prescription drugs illegally. The sign-in list of children is actually a Ghost Roll.  Prescription drugs are ravaging the Appalachians.

And an old friend's father comes to town.  The old friend who was the secret service friend in Bitter River. There are ghosts everywhere in Ghost Roll.

I was pulled into reality by an important statement in Ghost Roll...that outsiders look at a small town in those hills and think that it is quaint and filled with good people. It's not anymore. Things have changed. The economy has ground to a halt and the only people making money are bad people. Despair rules the day. That is the new reality.

Great read. Last Ragged Breath...August is not coming fast enough!