When writer Julia Keller talks, you notice a touch of West Virginia — it is, after all, her home state. Her accent may have faded a bit during her newspaper career in Chicago, so she says when she started thinking about writing crime novels, she was happy to hear the Appalachian voices coming out of her memory. "I was probably the most surprised person of all when I chose to set my fiction in West Virginia," she says. "[I] hadn't lived here in a long time, didn't really know that it moved in my blood — if it did." Turns out it did. And Keller — whose latest novel Summer of the Dead comes out in August — learned it helps that when you're imagining something awful to go where it could happen. Fictional Town 'More Real Than The World That I See' Keller says rivers can be mysterious, dark metaphors. Her second book in the series, Bitter River , is about the killing of a young girl. Keller knew what the riverbank crime scene might look like before she even started writing. "I have to thank
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