Julia Keller

Reprinted with permission from Reviewing the Evidence.

Julia Keller earned a Pulitzer as a journalist before turning to crime fiction. Perhaps that gives her greater license than others to rip stories from the headline. She explains in an author's note that this one, the sixth in her Bell Elkins series, was inspired during a visit to her home town of Huntington West Virginia, waking to learn the city had recorded 28 heroin overdoses in a single 24-hour period, two of them fatal. She imagined show more the effect such a crisis would have on her fictional mountain community of Ackers Gap where Bel Elkins, the county prosecutor, does her best to protect her home town from an epidemic of addiction that feeds off poverty, joblessness, and the loss of hope.

Readers are warned at the outset that the story will take place in a single day. It begins shortly after midnight when a gas station attendant lets a girl use the bathroom. When she doesn't come out, he asks a police officer to check. It's too late. She has died of an overdose.

At two a.m. Bell Elkins, a native of Ackers Gap who escaped a nightmarish childhood, only to return to serve as county prosecutor, is lying awake thinking about how she came home to make a difference and how pointless that seems as heroin takes the community in its grip. She's pondering an offer a friend has made to join a new law practice in DC Is there any point trying to help people who don't want to be helped? What good is she doing in a town where nothing is getting better?

When she arrives at work in the morning, she learns police have responded to five overdoses since midnight. Someone is cutting heroin with carfentanil, a synthetic drug that's more than two thousand times the strength of heroin, and as the day progresses police and EMTs will be on the run, bringing addicts back from the brink, putting up with their resentment at being pulled out of their stupor. Those dealing with the crisis wonder why they bother; the people they're working so hard to save have already given up and will only stagger off in search of their next score.

The pace of the book is slow at first as the characters are developed, but as the crisis deepens, it accelerates, with suspenseful plot tributaries flowing into the story, adding to the sense of time slipping away as things grow more and more desperate. Keller has always balanced a fierce love for the place she describes and its people with a gritty realism. This is the darkest entry in the series, and the shocking ending will leave readers wondering if dawn will ever come to these hills. show less

Almost heaven, West Virginia. Or so I have always believed thanks to my mother’s love for John Denver albums. And though she depicts a more nuanced and more tragically flawed version of the place than Denver manages in the three or four minutes a song allows, Julia Keller’s book shows a similar kind of devotion to the area and the people who call it home. LAST RAGGED BREATH is more a long-form love song to place than it is a crime novel, though it’s no slouch on that front either.

As a show more mystery the book is, at least on the surface, simple and as far from the high body count thrillers the genre is known for. Edward Hackel, a salesman for a high-end resort scheduled to be built in the area, is murdered. Struck on the head with a shovel and dumped in a creek. Suspicion soon falls on Royce Dillard, an enigmatic loner whose personal story is dominated by his survival as a toddler of a disaster that killed over a hundred people including both his parents. Hackel has been badgering Dillard to sell some land the development project desperately needed but that Dillard wanted for his own dream project. Case closed.

Prosecutor Bell Elkins is troubled though. Not necessarily by the idea that Dillard is innocent, though he steadfastly claims to be, but by the reason for the killing. It doesn’t seem like a straightforward premeditated, murder and if there are mitigating circumstances Bell will be able to seek a lesser sentence than lifelong prison for Dillard. Who if not exactly liked by the residents of the fictional town of Acker’s Gap is understood and accepted.

But Bell has other worries too. Her good friend Nick Fogelsong is no longer the town’s Sheriff. He chose to walk away and Bell can’t forgive him even though on one level she understands his decision. Their friendship was rooted in their shared work and now they can’t talk over cases as they always did. What else is there? The exploration of this relationship is a highlight of the novel; real friendship being something of a rarity in a genre replete with lone wolf heroes. Both characters are depicted realistically in the way they cope, or don’t, with the changes life brings and few readers would fail to identify with some aspect of what one or other goes through over the course of this story.

In the end though, and despite a compelling narrative and a host of thoughtfully drawn characters, Keller always draws the reader back to place. We see the good and the bad. The poverty and the wealth. We see people clinging desperately to what little remains of the coal mining industry not because they are unaware of the damage coal does to the planet or those that mine it but because their alternatives are abject poverty or drug running. Or leaving. But as Nick reflects

There was a time when he’d envied anyone who left Acker’s Gap, when he watched them go and felt a kind of wild yearning, when he wondered why Bell Elkins had ever wanted to come back here – but something was shifting inside him. There was a certain solace to knowing a world this well. You knew its flaws, its shortcomings, just as you knew its beauties. And you learned to love it all. You loved the abundance of it, the sweep and immensity of the land, and you loved the sadness and the lack, too.

This is one of those books that I was sad to finish reading not because of the story, or at least not only because of the story, but because I could happily have read more. Fortunately for me I’ve only read the first of this book’s three predecessors, 2012’s A KILLING IN THE HILLS, so I can at least track down the other two. And why wouldn’t I? Keller is a truly gifted writer and the elements that didn’t quite work for me in that first novel are all gone here. LAST RAGGED BREATH is about as flawless as they come. show less

I am in the middle of reading a critique of modern literary fiction for being too pretentious, too wordy, too boring. Perhaps if I weren't reading this other little book, I might not have found "A Killing in the Hills" quite so annoying. But it really reads as if the author tried to write a mystery but didn't want to be considered a genre hack and so added metaphors to every single stinking paragraph in the book. And not good metaphors, stupid ones. I gave the book back to the library show more yesterday so I can only remember one of them that annoyed me the most: in describing fall colors, the author referred to "...crazy reds, headstrong yellows...." Truly, how is red crazy? And how on earth does yellow get to be headstrong?

There are all manner of holes in the plot but the two worst are:

1. Daughter doesn't tell mom something critical because she is afraid mom will be mad at her for being at a party where there were drugs. Now nothing else, including a nose piercing, bothers this girl's mom so what makes daughter think mom is going to get upset about the party, considering how she ended up there? It's a contrivance created to keep the book going for another two hundred pages.

2. The big bad (not the actual killer - we know who he is fairly early on) is revealed out of the blue. There had been no indication whatsoever that he was the big bad; we were just all of a sudden told that he was. That, in murder-mystery land, is cheating.

So I'm completely mystified by the praise for this book. It's not a literary novel although it tries so hard to be one, but it's a lousy mystery because the author cheats. show less

The twinned ravages of poverty and drug addiction are destroying the people of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, a place that had always been hard-scrabble, but where there are now no jobs, not even ones that ended with black lung disease or a mine collapse, and where the once-tight bonds of family are coming unraveled. Bell Elkins got there first. Her family home went up in flames when she was ten years old, her sister sent to prison, the rest of her childhood spent in foster care. After show more marriage and escape from the mountains, she has returned with a daughter and a law degree to serve as the county attorney, prosecuting drug crimes with angry passion. Those crimes hit close to home when her sullen adolescent daughter witnesses a murder. Yet because she doesn’t want to tell her tightly-wound mother how she knows something about the crime, and because she resents the secrets her mother has kept from her, she decides to keep it to herself, a small bit of knowledge that she might be able to trade in someday for her mother’s respect.

Keller has created a vivid sense of place in Acker’s Gap, a place that shapes the people who live there. She provides so many visual cues and details of personality and characters’ relationships that at first I felt it was muffling the action like Kudzu vine, entangling and softening the edges of the tough subject matter. But I soon changed my mind. The place is part of the characters, and every one of the characters, however brief it seemed their appearance would be, turns out to be a part of the story. Here’s a taste of her style:

It was a shabby afterthought of a town tucked in the notch between two peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, like the last letter stuck in a mail slot after the post office has closed down for keeps. Acker’s Gap was situated within sight of the Bitter River, just over the ridge from the CSX Railroad tracks. It consisted of a half-dozen dusty, slanting downtown streets surrounded by several neighborhoods of older homes, two trailer parks, a tannery, a junkyard specializing in domestic auto parts, and a shut0down shoe factory ringed by a black-topped parking lot against which the weeds and the wadded-up Doritos bags and the crushed Camel packs were staging a hostile takeover . . . Just outside the city limits was a handful of played-out coal mines and, beyond and above them, the corrugated foothills of the Appalachians, their sides dense with sweet birch trees and scarlet oaks, the ground crowded with mountain laurel and black huckleberry.

That’s a lot of description (and I left some out); the post office simile is one of the little darlings that writing instructors often suggest should be murdered. But I began to appreciate this visual documentation as Keller’s way of honoring and preserving a place that is being changed for the worse. Her big, brooding mountain is a continual reference point in the book, but it’s the kind of landmark that is subject to the brutal economics of mountaintop removal, and the community in the mountain’s shadow is experiencing a new kind of poverty, one that has begun to consume the marrow of mountain life, family connections.

In a genre where tastes are often kept in neat boxes, with books designed from cover to contents to appeal to a particular audience, this novel is unusually approachable from many directions. Those who like character-driven stories in small town settings will find much to like, but those who want their crime fiction gritty and realistic, a fictional mirror of the times, will have that, too. Readers might be reminded of the Ballad books by Sharyn McCrumb, but I think a better likeness can be found in the novels of Denise Mina, which exhibit a similar refusal to confine themselves to the well-worn conventions of the genre’s niches or the easy comfort of larger-than-life villains. Keller finds all the material she needs in the reality of her native West Virginia, and where she excels is in bringing it to life on the page, with the beauty of the natural landscape, the sinewy strength of its history, and the squalid, sad, frustrating waste of so many lives. show less