Illinois Authors

The Illinois Center for the Book banner

Julia Keller

Born: in Huntington, West Virginia
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Keller taught at the University of Chicago. She currently lives in both Chicago and the state of Ohio.

Biography: Julia Keller has a doctoral degree in English literature at Ohio State University. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and she's taught at the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and Princeton. During her journalism career, she worked at The Ashland Daily Independent in Ashland, Ky.; The Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio; and The Chicago Tribune. Keller joined the Chicago Tribune in 1998 and was a longtime cultural critic there, a position that was created explicitly for her. In 2005, she won the Pulitzer Prize for a feature she wrote on the aftermath of a 2004 tornado that ravaged Utica, Illinois. Keller is also guest essayist on the PBS program, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.


Awards:
  • '''''A Killing in the Hills'''''
  • -- ILLINOIS READS Book List, Illinois Reading Council, 2014 '''''Bitter River'''''
  • -- Starred Review, Booklist
  • -- Starred Review, Kirkus '''''Summer of the Dead'''''
  • -- Starred Review, Kirkus '''''Last Ragged Breath'''''
  • -- Starre

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Non-Fiction; Science Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

E-Mail: julia@juliakeller.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Julia.Keller.Writer
Website: http://www.juliakeller.net/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Keller


Selected Titles

A killing in the hills /
ISBN: 1250003482 OCLC: 777662625

Prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins and her estranged teenage daughter, Carla, try to protect their town and each other in the aftermath of a shocking triple murder committed by an unknown shooter whose identity is gradually realized by Carla.

Back home /
ISBN: 1606840053 OCLC: 294884829

Egmont USA, New York : 2009.

Thirteen-year-old Rachel Browning understands that her father will be different after being injured in the Iraq War, but no one is prepared for the impact that his traumatic brain injury and other wounds have on the entire family.

Bitter River /
ISBN: 1250003490 OCLC: 827256721

Phone calls before dawn from the sheriff are rarely good news. When Bell Elkins picks up the phone she already knows she won't like what she's about to hear, but she's still not prepared for this: Lucinda Trimble's body has been found at the bottom of Bitter River-- and she was dead before her body ever hit the water. Searching for the truth, both behind Lucinda's murder and behind her own complicated relationships, will lead Bell down a path that might put her very life at risk.

Bone on bone /
ISBN: 1250190924 OCLC: 1001456185

"The next powerful chapter in Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's beloved Bell Elkins series sends readers headlong into the thick of a mystery as young as today's headlines -- but as old as the mountains that hold these lives in a tight grip. How far would you go for someone you love? Would you die? Would you kill? After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly case -- even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own. A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn. Bell has lost her job as prosecutor -- but not her affection for her ragtag, hard-luck hometown. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging."--

Dark mind rising /
ISBN: 9780765387653 OCLC: 1015812388

Two years after the universal surveillance system, Intercept, was destroyed, eighteen-year-old Violet Crowley opens a private detective agency and becomes obsessed with her first case--a death written off as suicide.

  Dark star calling /
ISBN: 9780765387691 OCLC: 1079870606

"Out in the observatory, protruding from the vast gap in the roof, was the giant telescope. It stared unblinkingly into the night sky, its gaze peering deep into the wilderness of stars. Somewhere within that wilderness was the single star Rez was determined to find. New Earth, 2297. A year after the resurrection of a universal surveillance system called the Intercept, New Earth is collapsing. Humanity is depending on a group of five friends to find them all a new home. Humanity's fate rests in the hands of Violet Crowley, a headstrong rebel and former detective turned hopelessly mediocre politician; Shura Lu, scientific genius and magnificently gifted artist; Kendall Mayhew, New Earth's Chief of Police; Tin Man Tolliver, Kendall's top deputy; and Steven J. Reznik, aka "Rez," NESA Director and Chief Technologist. Together they discovered their utopian home is on an unstoppable collision course with Earth. Together they look to the stars to find a world suitable for human life and what they find there--or rather who--will change them all forever."--Amazon.

Fast falls the night
ISBN: 9781250089618 OCLC: 957139084

The first drug overdose comes just after midnight, when a young woman dies on the dirty floor of a gas station bathroom. To the people of the small town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, it is just another tragedy. It is sad--but these days, depressingly familiar. But then there is another overdose. And another. And another. Prosecutor Bell Elkins soon realizes that her Appalachian hometown is facing its starkest challenge yet: a day of constant heroin overdoses from a batch tainted with a lethal tranquilizer. While the clock ticks and the bodies fall, Bell and her colleagues desperately track the source of the deadly drug--and engage in fierce debates over the wisdom of expending precious resources to save the lives of self-destructive addicts. Based on a real-life event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Keller's latest Bell Elkins novel Fast Falls the Night takes place in a single 24-hour period, unfurling against the backdrop of a shattering personal revelation that will change Bell's life forever--

Last ragged breath /
ISBN: 125004474X OCLC: 889735913

From the night-black depths of a coalmine to the sun-struck peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, from a riveting murder mystery to a poignant meditation on the meaning of love and family, the latest novel in the critically acclaimed series strikes out for new territory: the sorrow and outrage that spring from a real-life chapter in West Virginia history. Royce Dillard doesn't remember much about the day his parents-and one hundred and twenty-three other souls-died in the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster. He was only two years old when he was ripped from his mother's arms. But now Dillard, who lives off the grid with only a passel of dogs for company, is fighting for his life one more time: He's on trial for murder. Prosecutor Bell Elkins faces her toughest challenge yet in this haunting story of vengeance, greed and the fierce struggle for social justice. Richly imagined, vividly written and deeply felt, Last Ragged Breath is set in West Virginia, but it really takes place in a land we all know: the country called home.

Sorrow road /
ISBN: 1250089581 OCLC: 919105889

"From the small towns of Appalachia they came, the young men who joined the fight for liberty in World War II. Now they are elderly, and some of them--like Harmon Strayer, father of prosecutor Bell Elkins's former law school classmate--suffer from Alzheimer's. When Harmon dies in an Alzheimer's care facility from what appear to be natural causes, Bell confronts a mystery that brims with questions about memory, grief and the lethal cost of burying the past. During a winter of record snow and cold, Bell and the people of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, face isolation and hardship--and the threat from a killer who preys upon the old and the sick and the helpless"--

Summer of the dead
ISBN: 1250104467 OCLC: 889523558

High summer in Acker's Gap, West Virginia--but no one's enjoying the rugged natural landscape. Not while a killer stalks the small town and its hard-luck inhabitants. County prosecutor Bell Elkins and Sheriff Nick Fogelsong are stymied by a murderer who seems to come and go like smoke on the mountain. At the same time, Bell must deal with the return from prison of her sister, Shirley--who, like Bell, carries the indelible scars of a savage past. In the third mystery chronicling the journey of Bell Elkins and her return to her Appalachian hometown, we also meet Lindy Crabtree--a coal miner's daughter with dark secrets of her own, secrets that threaten to explode into even more violence. Acker's Gap is a place of loveliness and brutality, of isolation and fierce attachments--a place where the dead rub shoulders with the living, and demand their due.

The cold way home /
ISBN: 125019122X OCLC: 1089259446

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Keller welcomes readers back to West Virginia and a ragged chunk of what was once a high stone wall. This is all that remains of Wellwood, a psychiatric hospital for the poor that burned to the ground decades ago. And it is here that Bell Elkins--prosecutor turned private investigator--makes a grim discovery while searching for a missing teenager: a dead body, marred by a ghastly wound that can only mean murder.

The dark Intercept /
ISBN: 076538762X OCLC: 999366859

"In a radiant world of endless summer, the Intercept keeps the peace. Violet Crowley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of New Earth's Founding Father, has spent her life in comfort and safety. Her days are easy thanks to the Intercept, a crime-prevention device that monitors emotion. But when her long-time crush, Danny Mayhew, gets into a dangerous altercation on Old Earth, Violet launches a secret investigation to find out what he's hiding. An investigation that will lead her to question everything she's ever known about Danny, her father, and the power of the Intercept."--Jacket flap.

 

 

Accessibility