New York, NY: Bloomsbury (2014)



Mary Byrd Thornton could understand how a reporter couldnt resist the story: a nine-year-old boy sexually molested and killed on Mothers Day, 1966. A suspect to whom nothing would stick. A neighborhood riddled with secrets. No one, especially the bungling or complicit authorities, had been able to solve the crime. Now, thirty years later, the reporters call will reel a reluctant Mary Byrd from Mississippi back to Virginia where she must confront her family--and, once again, the murders irremovable stain of tragedy. Lisa Howorths remarkable "Flying Shoes" is a work of fiction, but the murder is based on the still-unsolved case of her stepbrother, a front page story in the "Washington Post." And yet this is not a crime novel; it is an honest and luminous story of a particular time and place in the South, where even calamitous weather can be a character, everyone has a story, and all are inextricably entwined. With a flamboyant cast, splendid dark humor, a potent sense of history, and a shocking true story at its heart, "Flying Shoes" is a rich and candid novel from a fresh new voice about family and memory and one womans flight from a wounded past.