Night Garden: A Novel

Night Garden is the story of a teenage girl in Appalachia confronting an explosive mix of addiction, grief, and sexuality. Shattered by a family tragedy, seventeen-year-old Marie Massey runs away from her affluent parents in a small Kentucky college town to live with an older man and his criminal family in a neighboring county. Her new life is threatening and thrilling, a nine-month journey into the criminal underworld of a rural Kentucky county that takes her from youthful innocence to dark levels of human experience. Her encounter with the handsome, charismatic, thirty-year-old Bobo Owens sets in motion the central story of the novel. In a deceptively subdued, almost dreamlike voice, the author draws the reader into the fast-moving, suspenseful plot. The novel unfolds in a sequence of vivid scenes, each of which is its own immediate story, carried by the author's taut, measured prose.