“The striking visceral quality of Ms. Barr’s action scenes is all the more remarkable because she writes with such a cool, steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man.” — New York Times Book Review
With 13 ½, Nevada Barr, New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels, has written a taut and terrifying psychological thriller. It carries the reader from the horrifying 1970s murder spree of a child— dubbed “Butcher Boy” by a shocked public—in Rochester, Minnesota, to Polly, the abused daughter of Mississippi “trailer trash,” to post-Katrina New Orleans. More
Richard was hurt bad. He knew it with the awful certainty one feels in that second when he steps back off a cliff and realizes it will be the last mistake he makes on this earth; that eternity of horror before his body smashes on the rocks.
Freakish light filtered through the snowstorm, the bright orange of
odium arc lamps picked up and tossed back by ten billion ice facets: sky, ground, tree limbs, air. More
