Let Me Die in His Footsteps
by Lori Roy
Summary
Roy's Kentucky is lavender country, hills of it, worked by families whose feuds have root systems, and her novel runs on two timelines a generation apart. In 1952, Annie Holleran, at the witching hour between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, sneaks across the property line to the Baines well, where tradition says a girl glimpses her future husband, and finds instead the future the family has dreaded: a body, and with it the reopening of everything the town of Hayden County agreed to stop discussing. In 1936, the buried timeline unwinds: Sarah Crowley and her sister Juna, the dark eyed girl the county feared, the accusation that sent a Baines boy to the last public hanging in the region, and the lies of that summer, which have been compounding interest for sixteen years.
The know how binds the strands: the women of Annie's line carry a documented local gift, a sense for what approaches, danger mostly, and Annie has inherited both the ability and Juna's unmistakable black eyes, which makes her, to half the county, the marked child of a poisonous mother she has never met. Roy alternates the timelines like a lock's tumblers, each chapter turning the next, the 1936 truth, who did what at the well and the gallows and why, arriving in the exact order that detonates the 1952 present, where Juna is rumoured to be coming home.
Around three hundred and forty pages, Southern gothic at a folk ballad's pitch.
Best for readers who want rural noir with the superstition treated as load bearing, two timelines braided into one long reckoning.
Historical Context & Significance
Let Me Die in His Footsteps won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2016, confirming the fastest ascent the award had seen from its own farm system: Lori Roy's debut Bent Road had taken the Edgar for first novel in 2012, and this third book made her one of the few writers to win both categories, the pairing since cited whenever the prize's talent pipeline is discussed.
The novel's hinge is historical fact: the 1936 public hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, the last public execution in America, whose carnival crowds embarrassed the country into abolishing the practice, transposed here into the Baines boy's gallows; Roy built the book around that inheritance of spectacle guilt.
Her subsequent standalones kept the territory, Florida and border South noir with women's histories at the centre, and the double Edgar remains the calling card, the quiet writer the committees kept finding.