Let Me Die in His Footsteps – Lori Roy Free Audiobook

Written by Lori Roy
Read by Andi Arndt, Emily Woo Zeller
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: June 2, 2015
Duration: 10:11:53

In the spellbinding and suspenseful Let Me Die in His Footsteps, Edgar Award–winner Lori Roy wrests from a southern town the secrets of two families touched by an evil that has passed between generations.

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952 exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines—not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before—but, armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family’s lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. Not finding what she had hoped for, she turns from the well and when the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, Annie will have much to explain and a past to account for.

It was 1936, and there were seven Baine boys. That year, Annie’s aunt, Juna Crowley, with her black eyes and her long blond hair, came of age. Before Juna, Joseph Carl had been the best of all the Baine brothers. But then he looked into Juna’s eyes and they made him do things that cost innocent people their lives. Sheriff Irlene Fulkerson saw justice served—or did she?

As the lavender harvest approaches and she comes of age as Aunt Juna did in her own time, Annie’s dread mounts. Juna will come home now, to finish what she started. If Annie is to save herself, her family, and this small Kentucky town, she must prepare for Juna’s return, and the revelation of what really happened all those years ago.

The devastating tale alternates between chapters set in 1936 narrated by Sarah Crowley and chapters set in 1952 from the third-person perspective of teenage Annie Holleran, whom Sarah has been raising as her daughter. But the key figure, never heard from directly, is Juna, Sarah’s younger sister (and Annie’s birth mother), a seductive, sinister force responsible for sending one man to the gallows and a boy to his death. … Annie’s discovery of a dead body on a neighboring farm leads to the unearthing of long-buried, still-dangerous secrets. This powerful story inspired by the last legal public hanging in the U.S. should transfix readers right up to its stunning final twist.

The evocative atmosphere of this mystery is greatly enhanced by narrators Andi Arndt and Emily Woo Zeller. The story takes place in Kentucky, moving between Annie Holleran’s story, set in 1952, and her mother Sarah’s, set in 1936. Arndt and Zeller portray Annie as a mature young adult whose family is flawed–even creepy. They give Sarah’s voice a soft Southern accent. The characters are often moody, but the author’s subtle humor is also reflected in the performance. Part of the story features the Hollerans’ switch from growing tobacco to growing lavender, and descriptions of that lovely scent adds much to the novel. The narrators’ deceptively simple reading imparts realism to a complex and strange story. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2015,