Hanahatchee by Trisha O’Keefe is scheduled to be republished by Argus Publishing in 2017.

Set in the late 1930’s in a small, southwestern Georgia town, an innocent black man is set to be executed for the murders of a store clerk found floating in the river by Charlie Russell while fishing, and his family who’d been found by a then twelve-year-old boy, Jordan Tanner, .

“Lord help me, I done found another body in the creek. Same place as I found poor Mr. Freddie Boyer. Done in the same way, too. Can you come on down home, Mr. Jordan? I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do,” Charlie Russell pleaded.

Nearly twenty years later, Tanner receives this distress call from Russell, who’d taught him to fish and hunt as a child. Charlie has caught something bigger than a fish—another dead man floating in the Hanahatchee River.

Tanner is now a reporter for a newspaper. His curiosity, and the fact that the victim is trussed-up just like the first body found in the Hanahatchee years before, spurs him to uncover the truth, something this rural community has been avoiding for too long.

As an anthropology student, many years ago, Trisha O’Keefe became aware of the past’s potential for mystery. “Until an instructor remarked that some of my student papers sounded more like novels,” O’Keefe says. In response to her mother’s question, “All that’s interesting but what are you going to do for a living?” the author taught school. “Or they taught me,” she says. “I’m a perfect example of history repeating itself. As one of those exasperating children always asking ‘why?’ I ‘m faced with an entire classroom full of them every day.” O’Keefe lives in Georgia where she teaches and, of course, writes mysteries.

Published by Argus Publishing (re-release 2017) Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency