Mystery Book Review: The Cold Way Home | Julia Keller | Bell Elkins #8

In the next powerful mystery from Julia Keller, former West Virginia prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins investigates the murder of a teenager while continuing to rebuild her life.

Bell Elkins and Jake Oakes make a good team, so good that they decide after years of working together to hang out their shingle: BJ Investigations, LLC. With his former-cop’s instinctive approach and her former-prosecutor’s affinity for facts, they’re a perfect fit for the routine clients who come their way. It’s not until Amber Slight’s body is uncovered face down in the West Virginia woods that they get their first real challenge.

With most of the forensic evidence at the scene destroyed by a week of rain, Bell and Jake have to rely on their wits to figure out what really happened to Amber, a mystery that may lead back to the halls of Ackers Gap High School. As Bell tries to uncover the truth, an old friend returns to town with motives Bell doesn’t quite trust. It’s up to Bell to face both challenges, those that could impact the living and those that honor the dead.

Pulitzer-prize winner Julia Keller returns to her acclaimed series that is as much about the life of a small Appalachian town as it is about the lives and deaths of its citizens. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

Review | The Cold Way Home

I picked up this book on a whim because I scanned the description and it sounded great, and I have heard wonderful things about Julia Keller. The Cold Way Home is a mystery thriller with a lot of depth to the plot and the characters. When I realized it was the eighth book in a series, I worried I’d struggle to connect to the story. I didn’t experience that at all. This could have been the first book, which is a compliment to a long-running series author.

The book centers around a complex woman named Bell Elkins, who has lived in Ackers Gap, West Virginia her whole life. Elkins works as a self-employed private investigator, though we learn that she was previously the town prosecutor. This story arc happened in the first seven books, but Keller does a great recap of it in The Cold Way Home that helped me understand Elkins—her history and who she is now.

Bell’s past as a prosecutor in West Virginia makes her a uniquely qualified character to solve the complex mystery in this small town. Bell’s experience as a lawyer isn’t her only experience with the law—we learn that she also served a prison term for killing her abusive father as a child. As the book opens, Bell is waiting to reapply for her law license and working as a private investigator in the meantime with two friends and colleagues: retired sheriff Nick Fogelsong who is in the process of a divorce, and former police officer Jake Oakes who was shot in the line of duty and is now in a wheelchair.

The Appalachia are in the midst of the opioid crisis, particularly the Huntington area where they live. The story opens with a startling and powerful scene that launches the reader straight into the story. A teenager named Dixie Sue is missing and her mother has contracted Bell, Nick, and Jake to find her. Jake is pursuing leads to locate Dixie Sue. Meanwhile a body is discovered in the woods near the ruins of a former mental institution outside of Ackers Gap and Bell accompanies the sheriff to notify the family.

It turns out the victim is not Dixie Sue. It’s a woman named Darla Gilley who had left her husband and was living in her family’s attic. Her brother Joe is close friends with Nick. Joe’s wife Brenda had given Darla a ride to town that morning. They also learn that her grandmother had been murdered at psychiatric facility, but the case has gone cold.

Darla mailed a family diary to Nick before her death that was written by her grandmother Bessie who worked at the young age of 14 at the mental institution, Wellwood. Bessie’s diary details her time working there and people she met, as well as horrible accounts of the lobotomies performed at the psychiatric institution and mistreatment of patients.

Bell and her colleagues pursue and clear different suspects and follow leads, including Darla’s ex-husband and a truck driver who had given her a ride and returned her purse to her family. Other leads suggest the possibility that a second diary exists. As the investigation continues, the case gets more complicated and information from the diaries seems to hold the key to solve the case.

A troubling case with compelling characters and relationships make this a gripping mystery. I liked Bell and want to go back and visit books where she was still serving as a prosecutor. I would imagine she was even more tenacious and intelligent than she was in this book. This is a story about despair, family, pain, and loyalty. It’s also a novel that ultimately provides hope despite darker themes.

About the Author | Julia Keller

Julia was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. She graduated from Marshall University, then later earned a doctoral degree in English Literature at Ohio State University.

She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton and Ohio State Universities, and the University of Notre Dame. She is a guest essayist on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and has been a contributor on CNN and NBC Nightly News. In 2005, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Julia lives in a high-rise in Chicago and a stone cottage on a lake in rural Ohio.