THE WHISPER OF LEAVES

"My whole life I’ve felt like I ought to apologize for who I am, and suddenly I find out I never had any reason to hang my head. It wasn’t just that my mother was killed or even that Jack was in prison for it. It was the rest, the idea that I should be ashamed. I was supposed to forget everyone I knew, act like they didn’t exist and I hadn’t existed here. Everyone taught me to shut myself off from what I was, Annie!”

“But you found it! You’ve won, Josie!”

“Annie, my people don’t run.”

Silence. She had said my people, as in my family. Annie would not have missed that, and yet she didn’t answer it either.

Finally, sadly, the old woman answered, “Josie, I don’t want to bury you.”

W

hen Josie Darling takes a one year appointment as a lecturer at Lues State University in the rugged hill country of southern Illinois, she tells no one that Lues was once her home. She=s a bit embarrassed by the fact that her stepfather killed her mother. She knows that she needs to come to terms with that murder, and so has returned twenty years later, but the closer she gets to home, the harder it is to chase the nightmare.

But Josie is about to find out that if you don=t chase the nightmare, it=s going to chase you. And this one is playing for keeps.

Using skills honed by years of literary research, the academic turns detective to save her very life in search for a truth that stretches across two decades. Struggling against an unseen but ever present enemy and with few allies she can truly depend on, Josie Darling embarks on search that will eventually rewrite everything she knows about her own past in an odyssey of self-discovery as she chases down history itself.

But what she needs most is not written in some forgotten police report; what she needs most is the thing she lost the day her mother was taken from her. It is there in the whisper of the leaves, the truth about herself that she has forgotten.

THIS BOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT OF PRINT, BUT I HAVE A NUMBER OF COPIES IN MY OFFICE THAT I AM WILLING TO SELL. IF YOU WOULD LIKE AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY, CONTACT ME VIA E-MAIL, AND I WILL GET BACK WITH YOU ON THE PRICE (QUITE MODEST) AND THE SHIPPING COSTS.