The Heart to Kill

The Heart to Kill
223 Pages
ISBN 978-1-62288-129-1

The literary fiction novel, The Heart to Kill, is a story of a horrible crime, an enduring friendship, and personal illumination. Sarah, a student at Northwestern University Law School, returns to her apartment to find two telephone messages. The first is that she has not been chosen for a coveted internship for which her father had arranged an interview; the second is that Sarah’s best friend in high school, JoBeth Ruland, has murdered her two children. To mislead her father about her failure to obtain the internship, Sarah decides to secure a position on JoBeth’s defense team and, against his wishes, returns to her family home in Eight Mile Junction, South Carolina.

She sets out to become a vital member of her friend’s defense team and to regain favor with her father, but is not well-prepared for working in a community rife with chauvinism, malice, duplicity, and betrayal. Her efforts are met with the benevolent amusement of the senior law partner, the resentment of the expert trial attorney, the rush to judgement by the folks of Eight Mile Junction, and discovery of the role of several individuals in the degradation of JoBeth.

This story was influenced by Euripides play, Medea as well as several women who have murdered their children. As one attorney commented on this book, there is a story behind each of these tragedies. JoBeth’s story is one of these.

Please visit the author's website, www.dorothymplace.com, where you can read more about the novel, how it came to written, and take a virtual tour of Eight Mile Junction.

Dorothy M. Place

About Dorothy M. Place (Sacramento, California Author)

Dorothy M. Place

Dorothy M. Place lives and works in Davis, California. Since submitting her first short story for publication in 2008, she has had ten stories accepted for publication in literary journals, one of which won first prize in the Mendocino Coast Writers Short Story Contest and the Estelle Frank Fellowship (2010.), another Honorable Mention in the Southern Gothic Revival Short Story contest (forthcoming 2016).

Her debut, literary fiction novel, “The Heart to Kill,” inspired by Euripides play, Medea, has been published by SFA Press and is available from Amazon. A book of short stories is currently being marketed and her second novel, “The Search for Yetta,” is in process. When not writing, she works on her bonsai collection, travels, and hikes.