I am sooooooo excited!!!! Today I get the EXCLUSIVE chapter 1 reveal for THE STEEP AND THORNY WAY by Cat Winters releasing in March 8th, 2016! I adore Cat's other books and am dying to read this one too! Check out the synopsis and the first chapter!!
The Steep and
Thorny Way
by
Cat Winters
Release
Date: March 8, 2016
Publisher:
Amulet Books
ISBN:
9781419719158
About the Book:
A thrilling reimagining of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Steep and Thorny Way tells the story of
a murder most foul and the mighty power of love and acceptance in a state gone
terribly rotten.
1920s Oregon is not a welcoming place for Hanalee Denney, the daughter of a white woman and an African-American man. She has almost no rights by law, and the Ku Klux Klan breeds fear and hatred in even Hanalee’s oldest friendships. Plus, her father, Hank Denney, died a year ago, hit by a drunk-driving teenager. Now her father’s killer is out of jail and back in town, and he claims that Hanalee’s father wasn’t killed by the accident at all but, instead, was poisoned by the doctor who looked after him—who happens to be Hanalee’s new stepfather.
The only way for Hanalee to get the answers she needs is to ask Hank himself, a “haint” wandering the roads at night.
1920s Oregon is not a welcoming place for Hanalee Denney, the daughter of a white woman and an African-American man. She has almost no rights by law, and the Ku Klux Klan breeds fear and hatred in even Hanalee’s oldest friendships. Plus, her father, Hank Denney, died a year ago, hit by a drunk-driving teenager. Now her father’s killer is out of jail and back in town, and he claims that Hanalee’s father wasn’t killed by the accident at all but, instead, was poisoned by the doctor who looked after him—who happens to be Hanalee’s new stepfather.
The only way for Hanalee to get the answers she needs is to ask Hank himself, a “haint” wandering the roads at night.
Find THE STEEP AND THORNY WAY Online:
The sneak peek . . .
CHAPTER
ONE: MURDER MOST FOUL
I
drew a deep breath and marched into the woods behind my house with a
two-barreled pistol hidden beneath my blue cotton skirt. The pocket-size
derringer rode against my outer right thigh, tucked inside a holster that had,
according to the boy who’d given it to me, once belonged to a lady bootlegger
who’d been arrested with three different guns strapped to her legs. Twigs
snapped beneath my shoes. My eyes watered and burned. The air tasted of damp
earth and metal.
Several
yards ahead, amid a cluster of maples blanketed in scaly green lichen, stood a
fir tree blackened by lightning. If I turned right on the deer trail next to
that tree and followed a line of ferns, I’d find myself amid rows of shriveled
grapevines in the shut-down vineyard belonging to my closest friend, Fleur, her
older brother, Laurence, and their war-widowed mama.
But
I didn’t turn.
I
kept trekking toward the little white shed that hid the murderer Joe Adder.
Fleur’s
whispers from church that morning ran through my head, nearly tipping me off
balance during my clamber across moss-slick rocks in the creek. “Reverend Adder
doesn’t even want his boy around anymore,” she had told me before the sermon,
her face bent close to mine, fine blond hair brushing across her cheeks. “He
won’t let Joe back in the house with the rest of the kids. Laurence is hiding
him in our old shed. And Joe wants to talk to you. He’s got something to say
about the night his car hit your father.”
I
broke away from the creek and hiked up a short embankment covered in sedges and
rushes that tickled my bare shins. At the top of the bank, about twenty-five
feet away, sat a little white structure built of plaster and wood. Before he
left for the Great War, Fleur’s father used to store his fishing gear and
liquor in the place, and he sometimes invited my father over for a glass of
whiskey, even after Oregon went bone-dry in 1916. Bigleaf maples hugged the
rain-beaten shingles with arms covered in leaves as bright green as under-ripe
apples. A stovepipe poked out from the roof, and I smelled the sharp scent of
leftover ashes—the ghost of a fire Joe must have lit the night before, when the
temperature dropped into the fifties.
I
came to a stop in front of the shed, my pulse pounding in the side of my
throat. My scalp sweltered beneath my knitted blue hat, along with the long
brown curls I’d stuffed and pinned inside. I leaned over and drew the hem of my
skirt above my right knee, exposing the worn leather of the holster. I took
another deep breath and wiggled the little derringer out of its hiding place.
With
my legs spread apart, I stood up straight and pointed the pistol at the shed’s
closed door. “Are you in there, Joe?”
A
hawk screeched from high above the trees, and some sort of animal splashed in
the pond that lay beyond the shed and the foliage. But I didn’t hear one single
peep out of Joe Adder.
“Joe?”
I asked again, this time in as loud and deep a voice as I could muster.
Tree-trunk strong, I sounded. Sticky sweat rolled down my cheeks, and my legs
refused to stop rocking back and forth. “Are you in there?”
“Who’s
there?”
I
gripped the pistol with both my hands. The voice I heard was a husky growl that
couldn’t have belonged to clean-cut, preacher’s-boy Joe, from what I remembered
of him. It and a splashing sound seemed to come from the pond, not the shed.
“Who’s
there?” he asked again. I heard another splash.
I
lowered the pistol to my side and crept around to the back of the shed, feeling
my tongue dry up from panting. I pushed past a tangle of blackberry bushes,
pricking a thumb on a thorn, and came to a stop on the edge of the bank. My
feet teetered on the gnarled white root of a birch.
In
the pond, submerged up to his navel in the murky green water, stood a tanned
and naked Joe Adder, arms akimbo, a lock of dark brown hair hanging over his
right eye. His shoulders were broad and sturdy, his biceps surprisingly
muscular, as though prison had worked that scrawny little white boy hard.
My
mouth fell open, and my stomach gave an odd jump. The last time I’d seen Joe,
back in February 1921, seventeen months earlier, he’d been a slick-haired,
sixteen-year-old kid in a fancy black suit, blubbering on a courthouse bench
between his mama and daddy.
This
new version of my father’s killer—now just a few months shy of his eighteenth
birthday, almost brawny, his hair tousled and wild—peered at me without
blinking. Drops of water plunked to the pond’s surface from his elbows.
“You
don’t want to shoot me, Hanalee,” he said in that husky voice of his. “I don’t
recommend prison to anyone but the devils who threw me in there.”
I
pointed the pistol at his bare chest, my right fingers wrapped around the grip.
“If you had run over and killed a white man with your daddy’s Model T,” I said,
“you’d still be behind bars, serving your full two years . . . and more.”
“I
didn’t kill anyone.”
“I
bet you don’t know this”—I shifted my weight from one leg to the other—“but
people tell ghost stories about my father wandering the road where you ran him
down, and I hate those tales with a powerful passion.”
“I’m
sorry, but—”
“But
those stories don’t make me half as sick as you standing there, saying you
didn’t kill anyone. If you didn’t kill him, you no-good liar, then why didn’t
you defend yourself at your trial?”
Joe
sank down into the water and let his chin graze the surface. Long, thick lashes
framed his brown eyes, and he seemed to know precisely how to tilt his head and
peek up at a girl to use those lashes to his advantage. “They never gave me a
chance to speak on the witness stand,” he said. “They hurried me into that
trial, and then they rushed me off to prison by the first week of February. And
I didn’t get to say a goddamned word.”
I
pulled the hammer into a half-cocked position with a click that echoed across
the pond. Joe’s eyes widened, and he sucked in his breath.
“You
lied to your family about delivering food to the poor that Christmas Eve,” I
said, “and you crashed into my father because you were drunk on booze from some
damn party. My new stepfather witnessed him die from injuries caused by you, so
don’t you dare fib to me.”
“Don’t
you dare shoot me before I talk to you about that stepdaddy of yours.”
“I
don’t want to hear what you have to say about Uncle Clyde. I’m not happy he
married my mama, but he’s a decent man.”
“Stop
pointing that gun at me and let me talk.”
“Give
me one good reason why I should listen to you.” I aimed the pistol at the skin
between Joe’s eyebrows. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t squeeze this
trigger and sh—”
“You
should listen to me, Hanalee, because you’re living with your father’s
murderer.”
I really enjoyed this one - Cat Winters is my auto-buy, must-read author. It was a beautifully written, and I think really important novel about the less palatable aspects of history.
ReplyDeleteLove this post. <3 Thank you so so much for sharing Jaime :D I aaaaadored this book the most. And I cannot wait to read it again :D And for others to read it too. Yay!
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