Richard's Swamp

In 1960s rural Virginia, three black children witness something they shouldn't. Now they're accused of murder.

When the town drunk's body surfaces in the Green Sea swamp, a traditionally forbidden area for black folks, the Old family's peaceful existence shatters. Aaron, Fair, and Miles were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in a town where justice wears a white face and truth bends to power, being innocent isn't enough.

As a biased Detective closes in with fabricated evidence while the real killers walk free, Forest and Betty Cole Old must protect their children from a system designed to destroy them. All while the Black community grows divided between self-preservation and solidarity, and a lone Black officer is caught between his badge and his conscience. The Old family faces an impossible choice: run, championing their guilt, or stay and fight a battle they cannot win.

Some secrets the swamp keeps. Others, it exposes. But in Cherrypeake, Virginia, just post of the Jim Crow era, the most dangerous truths are the ones everyone already knows.

For readers who were gripped by John Grisham's A Time to Kill and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Richard's Swamp delivers a heart-pounding thriller about the price of truth in a world built on lies.