Flying Shoes - Softcover

Lisa Howorth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408855631 ISBN 13: 9781408855638

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014

Synopsis

Thirty years ago, on Mother's Day, Mary Byrd Thornton's nine-year-old stepbrother was murdered. His killer was never found. At the time, Mary Byrd had been fifteen: in love and caught up in the excitement of the Sixties, but when Stevie died, her family and her life fell apart. For years she has struggled with the knowledge that the murderer is still out there, as well as her own nagging guilt over Stevie's death. Yet she has built a life for herself in Mississippi: she has married a Southern gentleman and has two children she adores. With her ramshackle house, her teeming garden and her menagerie of animals, she is immersed in a comfortable, if somewhat eccentric and occasionally restless day-to-day existence. When a journalist chances upon the mystery of Stevie's death and begins to dig into it, Mary Byrd suddenly finds herself on a reluctant journey back to her childhood home in Virginia. Along the way she encounters help from unexpected quarters and finds herself confronting not only her family's story but the stories of many others - both the living and the dead.

About this title

About the Author:

Lisa Howorth was born in Washington, DC, where her family has lived in the area for four generations. She moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where she married her husband, Richard, and raised their three children. They opened Square Books (named by Publishers Weekly as the 2013 Book Store of the Year) in 1979. Flying Shoes is a work of fiction, but the murder is based on the still-unsolved case of Lisa's stepbrother in 1966. @SquareBooks www.squarebooks.com

From Booklist:

On the eve of an important meeting with a semi-important photographer her art-­gallery-owner husband is courting, Mary Byrd Thornton gets word that her presence is required in Richmond, Virginia, to meet with detectives who have new theories about the decades-old case of her stepbrother’s murder. The trouble is, Mary Byrd lives in Mississippi, hates to fly, and needs to get out of town before an early spring ice storm shuts everything down. While exploring her various transportation options, including driving with Teever, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, or Jack Ernst, her sometime drug dealer and wannabe lover, Mary Byrd must also organize her household—her ­attitude-enhanced teenage daughter, Eliza; her space-geeky son, William; and her mostly absent husband, Charles—to function in her absence. And she’ll have to do so without the help of her help, Evagreen, whose own daughter has just murdered her husband. It’s all par for the course in the secretive, volatile Deep South for Howorth, who mined a tragic episode from her own personal history as dark inspiration for this buzz-worthy debut. --Carol Haggas

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1408855631
• ISBN 13: 9781408855638
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336