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Based on a real-life event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller’s latest Bell Elkins novel Fast Falls the Night takes place in a single 24-hour period, unfurling against the backdrop of a shattering personal revelation that will change Bell’s life forever.
The first drug overdose comes just after midnight, when a young woman dies on the dirty floor of a gas station bathroom. To the people of the small town of Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, it is just another tragedy. It is sad—but these days, depressingly familiar.
But then there is another overdose. And another. And another.
Prosecutor Bell Elkins soon realizes that her Appalachian hometown is facing its starkest challenge yet: a day of constant heroin overdoses from a batch tainted with a lethal tranquilizer. While the clock ticks and the bodies fall, Bell and her colleagues desperately track the source of the deadly drug—and engage in fierce debates over the wisdom of expending precious resources to save the lives of self-destructive addicts.
Julia Keller
Julia Keller earned a Ph.D. in English Literature at Ohio State University and has taught at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Julia was chief literary critic and staff writer at the Chicago Tribune, where she won the paper's first Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She is the author of an eight-volume mystery series; a science fiction trilogy for young adults; a biography of Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun; and Quitting, an argument for the limits of perseverance. Julia has contributed many on-air essays to The NewsHour on PBS and NPR's All Things Considered and delivered a TEDx talk.
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