An old convict returns to Troy and sends Brady’s newsroom into chaos
As he was driven to Angola, Cory Wilde prayed his torment was just a dream. But the murder was real, and so was his sentence: twenty-nine years working the sugar cane fields in one of the nation’s cruelest prisons. When he is finally released, he is an old man, drained of every drop of life that once made him such a terror, but his name still has the power to make the people sweat in Troy, Louisiana.
At first Pete Brady, the new owner of the town’s weekly newspaper, doesn’t understand why his readers are so afraid of this broken old man. The original case against Wilde, whose life was spared despite the fact that he committed a capital crime, raises questions Brady cannot answer. Chasing this story could mean a lynch mob whose sights are set not just on the old man, but on Brady himself.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1941, Malcolm Shuman grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and was educated at Louisiana State University, which awarded him a B.A. in 1962 in the fields of geography & anthropology. Shuman then had the privilege of serving in the U.S. Army from 1963 to 1966 where, as a member of the military police, he was assigned to Sandia Base New Mexico, with a Top Secret security clearance.