‘Summer of the Dead’: Return to Ackers Gap

“Summer of the Dead”

by Julia Keller (Minotaur, 400 pages, $25.99)

Ackers Gap, West Virginia. After my previous travels there, no encouragement was necessary for another excursion.

The town is more than merely a speck on an imaginary map, and it is a way to channel my former Chicago Tribune and Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague — and great friend — Julia Keller, who has made this town her own literary Yoknapatawpha County.

In “Summer of the Dead,” Keller’s third mystery picks up her chronicle of County Prosecutor Bell — short for Belfa — Elkins, who has returned to her Appalachian home town and made a life for herself. But life is complicated: Bell’s sister Shirley is out of prison, her ex-husband has manipulated the situation so that her daughter is not coming home for the summer, her friend Sheriff Nick Fogelsong is bringing his wife back from a Chicago psychiatric facility. Finally, the town is on edge after the murder of two town residents. As Fogelsong complains, “Just what we need. A bunch of panicked people hoarding ammo and buying pit bulls from their cousins.”

Thrown into the mix are Riley Jessup, the slick, affluent former governor, who is donating an MRI machine for the new hospital and may be stonewalling the murder investigation, and Lindy Crabtree, feisty, book-loving daughter of a retired coal miner who works the overnight shift at a gas station and convenience store, and thinks her lumbering father may be the killer. Finally, Shirley may be taking up with a guy in a local band. Bell — caustic, perceptive and usually right — notes the pair’s stature gap.

In this third novel, Keller digs even more deeply to expose the contradictions of Appalachia — a place where beautiful landscape coexists with poverty. Lindy — named for Anne Morrow Lindbergh — lives for her mail delivery of books and magazines and was encouraged by her late mother to surround herself with “shiny scraps and dabs that reminded you of a radiant elsewhere, of something other than dirt roads and pinched-off horizons.”

Bell’s wry observations are not limited to those around her in Acker’s Gap but extend to the professional world of doctors and lawyers.

The mystery is solved, and the novel closes, and while Bell will move on to her next case, readers can eagerly anticipate the next Bell Elkins novel. (This one follows “A Killing in the Hills” and “Bitter River.”)

What remains for readers — or maybe just this reader — has less to do with the wonderfully intricate plot lines than Keller’s original voice, which is amplified by her marvelous use of language.

Images remain: an awkward young man with “skin energetically colonized by red pimples”; the greasy coroner, who chuckles with a “lascivious twist at the end, like a coiled dollop of soft-serve ice cream at the top of the cone”; heat so extra heavy that it clings to Bell’s skin “like a layer of Saran Wrap.”

I’m looking forward to next summer at Acker’s Gap.