WHAT THE SWAMP KEEPS

Palmetto Bend, Florida, 1994. Wade Tatum is eighteen. His brother Caleb is sixteen. For as long as either of them can remember, their father, Royce, has beaten them and their mother with his fists, his boots, and his belt, and nobody in Dunmore County has lifted a hand to stop him.

On a Friday night in October the brothers drag a cypress log across the road home, wait in the ditch with Royce’s own revolver, and stop him themselves. They give the body to the alligators in Blackwater Slough, crush his truck flat at the scrapyard where Wade works, and leave a goodbye letter on the kitchen table in his handwriting.

Then the gun goes missing. A single bullet turns up in the mailbox with one word on a scrap of paper: FOUR. Somebody counted the shots. Somebody wants cars crushed at two in the morning, with orders not to look in the trunk.

Detective Nora Pike left Tampa homicide eight months ago and is the only one in the sheriff’s office who doubts the letter. She knows a forgery when she sees one. She also learns what went on in that house for nineteen years. With a hurricane turning toward the coast, the closer she gets to the Tatum boys, the closer she gets to the man who owns them.

Their mother, Loretta, has prayed in the fourth pew for nineteen years. She read the letter once and knew. Now she has to decide what a mother owes the sons she did not protect.

WHAT THE SWAMP KEEPS is a Southern crime novel about what a family will do to survive, and what it costs to tell the truth.