Synopsis of published works
Synopsis
1984, a young boy’s body is discovered near Crosstown, rural East Texas, triggering a manhunt by the local sheriff, Travis Lafayette Boudin. The cause of death is a pit in the vertebrae, possibly made by a bayonet. Boudin learns of similar finds around the South.
Backstory: During the riot at Ole Miss as a black student tries to enroll in September 1962, Nathan Purvis and his stepsister, Nelda, kill their incestuous parents. Nathan reinvents himself as Nathan Bedford Forrest VI, claiming descent from the legendary Confederate cavalry officer. Together, Nathan and Nelda roam flea markets in the South, recruiting gullible runaways to be slaughtered at Civil War reenactments by a band of deviants, veterans of the massacre at My Lai, Vietnam. Nathan is a “ghost.” He recruits and leaves the killing to others.
Boudin partners (reluctantly at first) with a young journalist, Bobbie Hicks, recently arrived in town in search of her young brother and father who vanished five years earlier from the family home in Temperance Hall, Tennessee. Bobbie finds her missing father who is now Harvey Thompson, a Pentecostal preacher whom she knows -- from experience -- to be obsessed with begetting ‘blood progeny’. Also missing is a local teenage girl who vanished one year earlier. Bobbie’s clandestine surveillance of her father draws her into a battle reenactment in Louisiana where she is bayonetted and left for dead. Boudin’s deputy reports that a child, about two years old, has been secretly living in the Preacher’s home.
After recovering from her wounds, Bobbie and Boudin travel to the reenactment in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, based on their instincts (correctly) about where the next killings will be. Although Boudin is unable to prevent the murder of more victims, he kills the perpetrators as they attack him in the darkness, one of whom is Bobbie’s older brother whom she does not yet know about.
Even though Boudin is a Democrat in a fiercely Republican state, and a Vietnam veteran, he remains a local hero and has been reelected ever since, ten years earlier, he chased and gunned down three prison escapees after they raped and murdered his pregnant wife while he away.
Boudin and Bobbie travel to her hometown where she seeks clues to the disappearance of her young brother. She meets an old friend, now crippled and alcoholic, who reveals that her father murdered her mother and fled with her young brother. She also learns of the existence of a previously unknown, murderous older brother and recognizes that he was among those Boudin killed at the Murfreesboro reenactment.
With her knowledge of forensic DNA analysis, Bobbie outsmarts Boudin, recovering a tissue sample from the morgue and confirms that the River Boy is her young brother. She recovers her brother’s body from the morgue and she and Boudin return to Temperance Hall to bury him next to the grave of his, and her, murdered mother.
The manhunt leads back to Crosstown. Nathan and the Preacher have never met, yet they each fear discovery and capture. Nathan returns to Crosstown to deliver a kidnapped girl (for “breeding,”) to his Boss (Bobbie’s older brother). Nathan tells the Preacher that the Boss, the Preacher’s older son, was killed at the Murfreesboro reenactment. Before Boudin can apprehend either the Preacher or Nathan -- of whose existence he is unaware – Nathan and the Preacher flee Crosstown.
As the story closes, Bobbie suspects that the young boy seen at her father’s house may be her half-brother. The child and the woman who called herself the Preacher’s wife, have disappeared, and Bobbie wants to find the child. Her search (possibly in a sequel) will be difficult. No forensic evidence remains in the house with which to establish a link between Bobbie and the child. Everything (clothing, food, fluids) that could possibly link the Preacher to any of the missing children was destroyed when a stranger bought the abandoned house, inadvertently discovered the hidden ‘storm cellar’, and cleansed all of its contents by solvents and fire.
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