"Magical. Breathtaking. A true original." –Peggy Webb, USA Today bestselling author of The Language of Silence

From the bestseller author of The Lost Page.

In Twenty Mile Bottom, Mississippi, a grandmother mysteriously disappears. Her 18-year-old grandson, Roy Gene, smells a rat and launches his own investigation. Unbeknownst to him is a domestic terrorist plot masked by a renegade religious cult run by a gypsy fortuneteller and his alcoholic evangelist grandfather. The grandfather's infamous Halloween service, The Devil Walks at Midnight is the emotional lynch pin to a corrupt theology of fear that keeps everyone in line... except Roy Gene's grandmother... and Roy Gene.

Others smell a rat, too. Federal investigator Chase Hightower, probing why Twenty Mile Bottom has over 500 disability cases of paranoid schizophrenia, crosses paths with Roy Gene and the two join forces. As conspiracies unravel and murders are solved, all hell, literally, breaks loose as Twenty Mile Bottom goes up in a cataclysmic explosion and conflagration.

The narrative takes the reader through a rollicking farcical world of hilarity and pathos, and of sin and redemption, with glimpses into the world of disability fraud, domestic terrorism, and unsung disability investigators.

Review

"Magical. Breathtaking. A true original." -Peggy Webb, USA Today bestselling author of The Language of Silence

"This is a wonderful Southern spooky who-dunnit." -George Singleton, author of You Want More: Selected Stories

About the Author

Joe Edd Morris is the author of Land Where My Fathers Died, The Prison (both awarded Best Fiction by the Mississippi Library Association), Torched: Summer of '64 (Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Montaigne Medal and Maxie Awards finalist), The Lost Page and The Lost Gospel. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals. Joe Edd is a psychologist and retired United Methodist minister. He and his wife, Sandi, live in Tupelo, Mississippi, where he has a private practice in psychology. He enjoys traveling, gardening, playing the piano and writing.