A KIND AND SAVAGE PLACE

The Newest Dramatic Historical Novel from Richard Helms!

It's 1954. The place is Prosperity, North Carolina, a small farming community in rural Bliss County. Three teenagers, the championship-winning offensive backfield for Prosperity High, and lifelong friends, are unwilling participants in a horrifying crime that results in a young man's death.

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One of the friends harbors a tragic secret that could have prevented the crime, but revealing it would ruin his life, so he stays silent, fully aware he will carry the stain of guilt his entire life.

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The three buddies go their separate ways for fourteen years, until another tragedy pulls them back to Prosperity in 1968.  They are now in their thirties, and in the midst of a time of social and racial unrest in America.

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They discover the man who committed the crime back in 1954 is now the mayor of Prosperity, and rules the town with an autocratic iron fist, backed by his own private force of sheriff's deputies who forcibly intimidate and silence any malcontents.

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Worse, he plans to run for Congress.

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A Kind and Savage Place spans half a century from 1942 to 1989 and examines the dramatic racial and social turmoil of that period through the microcosmic lens of a flyspeck North Carolina farming community.

​​A Kind and Savage Place, the 22nd novel by Silver Falchion, Derringer, Thriller, Macavity, and Shamus Award-winning author Richard Helms, will be available on all online bookseller sites on March 1st, 2022!