Review: Evening Street (Bell Elkins #4.5) by Julia Keller

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 881 KB
• Print Length: 76 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books (Dec 8 2015)
• Sold by: Macmillan CA
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0111HW0E4

Book Description


By day, she's a tough-minded prosecutor in Raythune County, West Virginia, a region scarred by poverty and prescription drug abuse. By night, Bell Elkins takes on a softer role. She volunteers at an auxiliary intensive care unit where nurses deal with the youngest and most vulnerable victims of drug abuse: the children born to mothers addicted to painkillers.

The place is known as Evening Street, and it is here Bell comes whenever she can spare the time. She rocks ailing infants to sleep, and she provides what medical science-for all of its marvels-cannot: A simple human touch.

One terrifying night, the distraught father of an Evening Street baby breaks into the facility. Gun in hand, he holds the staff hostage and demands a reckoning for a family grudge--with helpless infants only inches away.

And so begins a standoff at Evening Street. Bell Elkins is swept up into the crisis, as the drama escalates toward a lethal flashpoint. At the center of it all is a baby, only hours old, but already ancient in his knowledge of pain.


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

Evening Street is a novella in the Bell Elkins series by author Julia Keller. I am a huge fan of this series set in West Virginia.

Bell Elkins is a prosecutor in Acker's Gap, West Virginia. The mountains of West Virginia where Bell lives, are filled with broken, ragged people. Many of the citizen there, who are caught up in a cycle of despair and hurt, are addicted to prescription drugs. Sadly many babies of addicts are born addicted and require very special care. Bell has been volunteering with these babies and is very affected by it.

One newborn, Abraham, becomes the center of a drama that unfolds one night at the auxiliary intensive care unit where the babies are cared for. Bell and the nurses there deal with a distraught father who is drunk and torn up about the situation his baby is in. It is a tense drama highlighting the emotions those involve face. Shots are fired and there is a stand-off...

Author Julia Keller does a fabulous job bringing the issues of these mountain people to light. Evening Street is a great novella.

Now I need to wait for August 2016 for Sorrow Road. Looking forward to it. There is a sample of Sorrow Road included with Evening Street.