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The devil you know
Her name was never the devil.
Crystal Carter is fifteen the fall she is sent away and carrying a secret that could bring down her father's pulpit. So he does what powerful men do with inconvenient he puts her on a southbound bus to a distant cousin the whole county has already damned.
At the end of a red clay road, in a house crowded round with apple trees, waits Gilda Ann Prater. They say she killed her husband. They say worse. But the devil keeps a clean house. The devil plays piano. And the longer Crystal lives behind Gilda's locked door, the more she understands that everything the county knows is a story somebody needed told.
Told by a grown woman to the son she raised, The Devil You Know asks what it costs to stand in the road between the devil and a child — and who gets to decide who the devil is.
For readers of The Secret Life of Bees — a Southern story about judgment, mercy, and the names we put on people so we never have to know them.
Don't decide too quickly.
Crystal Carter is fifteen the fall she is sent away and carrying a secret that could bring down her father's pulpit. So he does what powerful men do with inconvenient he puts her on a southbound bus to a distant cousin the whole county has already damned.
At the end of a red clay road, in a house crowded round with apple trees, waits Gilda Ann Prater. They say she killed her husband. They say worse. But the devil keeps a clean house. The devil plays piano. And the longer Crystal lives behind Gilda's locked door, the more she understands that everything the county knows is a story somebody needed told.
Told by a grown woman to the son she raised, The Devil You Know asks what it costs to stand in the road between the devil and a child — and who gets to decide who the devil is.
For readers of The Secret Life of Bees — a Southern story about judgment, mercy, and the names we put on people so we never have to know them.
Don't decide too quickly.
171 pages, Hardcover
Published August 27, 2026
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