Carolina Skeletons
Based on a True Story
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Edgar Award winner: Based on true events, a chilling tale of murder and injustice in the Jim Crow South
As a fourteen-year-old black boy living in 1940s South Carolina, Linus Bragg should know better than to follow the two bicycling white girls. But something about Sue Ellen and Cindy Lou compels him. Maybe it’s the way Cindy Lou speaks to him, or how Sue Ellen sits on her bike. Whatever the reason, he follows the girls into the woods. It’s the worst mistake he ever makes. When he comes into the clearing, both girls are dead and young Linus is the natural suspect. Forty years later, a nephew of Linus’s returns to South Carolina, curious about this dark moment in his family’s past. To find the fourth person who visited the clearing that day means reopening a sinister chapter of the small town’s history, which certain evil men had thought closed forever.
Carolina Skeletons is based on the 1944 case of George Stinney Jr., who, at the age of fourteen, became the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century. After a hastily scheduled hearing only a few hours long, the jury quickly charged him with a double murder. He was put to death three months later.
A haunting journey into America’s shameful past, Carolina Skeletons deftly explores how history’s skeletons rarely stay hidden forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When two young white girls are killed in the small South Carolina town of Alcolu in 1944, the hunt for their murderer turns almost immediately to the flimsy shacks that house the "colored'' mill workers. Based on an actual event, this novel faithfully renders its place and time. The thick Southern heat, and the absolute, unequal balance between whites who mark the social boundary lines and blacks who stay within them in order to survive, make it possible to believe that the few words spoken by Linus Bragg, the scared-silent, 14-year-old black boy who is executed for the crime, could be fatally twisted to mean more than the child who spoke them had ever intended. Forty-four years later, James Willop, an unemployed New Jersey newsman, goes to Alcolu to dig for the truth behind his Uncle Linus's death. He finds the town superficially changed, but when two more murders occur Willop has reason to fear that the same deadly racist tensions running beneath the surface could drag him under as well. Stout, an editor at the New York Times, has produced an accomplished, sadly evocative novel, only slightly marred by loose ends and a somewhat blustery tone in its second half.
Customer Reviews
Great Read
Great read. Makes you hate then Sheriff and then respect him in the end.