Julia Keller has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Bitter River.
Bitter River
Summary
Phone calls before dawn are never good news. And when you're the county's prosecuting attorney, calls from the sheriff are rarely good news, either. So when Bell Elkins picks up the phone, she already knows she won't like what she's about to hear, but she's still not prepared for this: sixteen-year-old Lucinda Trimble's body has been found at the bottom of Bitter River. And Lucinda didn't drown - she was dead before her body ever hit the water. With a case like that, Bell knows the coming weeks are going to be tough. But that's not all Bell is coping with these days. Her daughter is now living with Bell's ex-husband, hours away. Sheriff Nick Fogelsong, one of Bell's closest friends, is behaving oddly. Furthermore, a face from her past has resurfaced for reasons Bell can't quite figure. Searching for the truth, both behind Lucinda's murder and behind her own complicated relationships, will lead Bell down a path that might put her very life at risk. In Bitter River, Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Keller once again weaves a compelling, haunting mystery set against the stark beauty and extreme poverty of a small West Virginia mountain town.
©2013 Julia Keller (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Summer of the Dead
Summary
High summer in Acker's Gap, West Virginia - but no one's enjoying the rugged natural landscape. Not while a killer stalks the small town and its hard-luck inhabitants. County prosecutor Bell Elkins and Sheriff Nick Fogelsong are stymied by a murderer who seems to come and go like smoke on the mountain. At the same time, Bell must deal with the return from prison of her sister, Shirley - who, like Bell, carries the indelible scars of a savage past. In Summer of the Dead, the third Julia Keller mystery chronicling the journey of Bell Elkins and her return to her Appalachian hometown, we also meet Lindy Crabtree - a coal miner's daughter with dark secrets of her own, secrets that threaten to explode into even more violence. Acker's Gap is a place of loveliness and brutality, of isolation and fierce attachments - a place where the dead rub shoulders with the living, and demand their due.
©2014 Julia Keller (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Sorrow Road
Summary
From the small towns of Appalachia they came, the young men who joined the fight for liberty in World War II. Now they are elderly, and some of them - like Harmon Strayer, father of prosecutor Bell Elkins's former law school classmate - suffer from Alzheimer's. When Harmon dies in an Alzheimer's care facility from what appear to be natural causes, Bell confronts a mystery that brims with questions about memory, grief and the lethal cost of burying the past. During a winter of record snow and cold, Bell and the people of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, face isolation and hardship - and the threat from a killer who preys upon the old and the sick and the helpless.
©2016 Julia Keller (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Dark Mind Rising: A Dark Intercept Novel
Summary
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller continues her Dark Intercept science-fiction series with Dark Mind Rising, a thrilling, speculative murder mystery set in a chilling future where citizens believe they're free after years of emotional surveillance only to discover a killer is targeting their deepest fears.
When the state is no longer watching, what will you give to feel safe?
New Earth, 2296. Two years after the destruction of a universal surveillance system called the Intercept, New Earth struggles to keep crime under control. The citizens are free but not protected.
Violet Crowley, the 18-year-old daughter of New Earth's founder, has opened Crowley & Associates, a private detective agency, to handle the overflow from the overburdened police force.
Violet's first case - a death written off as a suicide - becomes an obsession. Soon, a series of similar deaths leads Violet to believe the Intercept is not only still running - it's in the hands of a killer.
“In this fast-paced book, Julia Keller shows she’s at the top of her game - and her game is creating chills and absolute terror.” (New York Times best-selling author R.L. Stine)
The Dark Intercept:
The Dark Intercept
Dark Mind Rising
Dark Star Calling
The Tablet of Scaptur (novella)
©2018 Tor Teen (P)2019 Journalstone
Last Ragged Breath
Summary
From the night-black depths of a coal mine to the sun-struck peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, from a riveting murder mystery to a poignant meditation on the meaning of love and family, the latest novel in the critically acclaimed series strikes out for new territory: the sorrow and outrage that spring from a real-life chapter in West Virginia history. Royce Dillard doesn't remember much about the day his parents - and one hudnred and twenty-three other souls - died in the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster. He was only two years old when he was ripped from his mother's arms. But now Dillard, who lives off the grid with only a passel of dogs for company, is fighting for his life one more time: He's on trial for murder. Prosecutor Bell Elkins faces her toughest challenge yet in this haunting story of vengeance, greed, and the fierce struggle for social justice. Richly imagined, vividly written and deeply felt, Last Ragged Breath is set in West Virginia, but it really takes place in a land we all know: the country called home.
©2015 Julia Keller. (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Cold Way Home: A Novel
Summary
"[An] emotion-charged mystery....Keller's sleuths are easy to like and the murder story is moving; but the object of fascination here is Wellwood, a state-run mental institution with a dark history as a repository for 'rebellious, unruly women.'" (The New York Times Book Review) Pulitzer Prize-winning author Julia Keller welcomes listeners back to West Virginia, where her lyrical and moving stories of the people of her native state have unfolded since A Killing in the Hills, the acclaimed first novel in the series. Deep in the woods just outside Acker's Gap, West Virginia, rises a ragged chunk of what was once a high stone wall. This is all that remains of Wellwood, a psychiatric hospital for the poor that burned to the ground decades ago. And it is here that Bell Elkins - prosecutor turned private investigator - makes a grim discovery while searching for a missing teenager: A dead body, marred by a ghastly wound that can only mean murder. To solve the mystery of what happened in these woods where she played as a child, Bell and her partners - former sheriff Nick Fogelsong and former deputy Jake Oakes - must confront the tangled history of Wellwood and its dark legacy, while each grapples with a private torment. Based on a true chapter in the troubled history of early treatment for psychiatric illness, The Cold Way Home is a story of death and life, of despair and hope, of crime and - sometimes, but not always - punishment.
©2019 Julia Keller (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Fast Falls the Night
Summary
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. 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.
©2017 Julia Keller (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved
The Dark Intercept
Summary
The Dark Intercept by Julia Keller is the beginning of a “riveting” (Emmy Laybourne) science fiction adventure that challenges the voluntary surrender of liberties for the perception of safety. When the state controls your emotions, how hard will you fight to feel free? In a radiant world of endless summer, the Intercept keeps the peace. Violet Crowley, the 16-year-old daughter of New Earth’s Founding Father, has spent her life in comfort and safety. Her days are easy thanks to the Intercept, a crime-prevention device that monitors emotion. But when her long-time crush, Danny Mayhew, gets into a dangerous altercation on Old Earth, Violet launches a secret investigation to find out what he's hiding. An investigation that will lead her to question everything she's ever known about Danny, her father, and the power of the Intercept. Much like the device itself, The Dark Intercept will get under your skin. The Dark Intercept is a Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Excellence in Children’s and Young Adult Science Fiction Notable List selection!
©2017 Julia Keller (P)2018 Journalstone Publishing
Bone on Bone
Summary
Bone on Bone, the next powerful chapter in Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's beloved Bell Elkins series, sends readers headlong into the thick of a mystery as young as today's headlines - but as old as the mountains that hold these lives in a tight grip. How far would you go for someone you love? Would you die? Would you kill? After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly case - even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own. A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn. Bell has lost her job as prosecutor - but not her affection for her ragtag, hard-luck hometown. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging.
©2018 Julia Keller. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
A Killing in the Hills
Summary
What’s happening in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia? Three elderly men are gunned down over their coffee at a local diner, and seemingly half the town is there to witness the act. Still, it happened so fast, and no one seems to have gotten a good look at the shooter. Was it random? Was it connected to the spate of drug violence plaguing poor areas of the country just like Acker’s Gap? Or were Dean Streeter, Shorty McClurg, and Lee Rader targeted somehow? One of the witnesses to the brutal incident was Carla Elkins, teenaged daughter of Bell Elkins, the prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, West Virginia. Carla was shocked and horrified by what she saw, but after a few days, she begins to recover enough to believe that she might be uniquely placed to help her mother do her job. After all, what better way to repair their fragile, damaged relationship? But could Carla also end up doing more harm than good - in fact, putting her own life in danger? In this powerful, intricate debut from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Julia Keller, a mother and a daughter try to do right by a town and each other before it’s too late.
©2012 Julia Keller (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.