Breakheart Hill
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Thomas H. Cook |
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| Publisher | Crimeline |
| Honors | |
The town was Choctaw, Alabama. The place was Breakheart Hill. The girl was Kelli Troy. But the story of what really happened to her there on an August afternoon in 1962 is known by only one man, Ben Wade, the boy who loved her then and who must tell her story now:
“For what really happened never truly leaves me, no matter how often my imagination insists upon rewriting it. I hear the blow that echoed through the trees, see her fall to the ground, then rise and begin to stagger up the killing slope…. And after that, each life returns to me, each life… | |
The town was Choctaw, Alabama. The place was Breakheart Hill. The girl was Kelli Troy. But the story of what really happened to her there on an August afternoon in 1962 is known by only one man, Ben Wade, the boy who loved her then and who must tell her story now:
“For what really happened never truly leaves me, no matter how often my imagination insists upon rewriting it. I hear the blow that echoed through the trees, see her fall to the ground, then rise and begin to stagger up the killing slope…. And after that, each life returns to me, each life that was destroyed in the deep woods that day, their faces circling in my mind, one behind the other like heads on a potter’s wheel.”
The violence that rocked Breakheart Hill on that summer afternoon did not end on its wooded slope. At least not for Ben Wade, now the town’s doctor and one of its most revered citizens. Perhaps it never ended for anyone in Choctaw.
Honors
Reviews
Barnes and Noble
A haunting tale of love, its aftermath, and the price a whole town paid for a single moment of passionate betrayal. The Los Angeles Times Book Review hailed author Cook as a “storytelling writer of poetic narrative power.”
