In a Temple of Trees

the long version

Cecil Durgin, a twelve-year-old African-American orphan, witnesses the perverse buildup to a brutal murder at an exclusive hunting camp in 1958. Decades later, the shame and guilt are still haunting him when fissures start forming in the lives of several characters unwittingly connected by a young woman’s body buried deep in the West Alabama woods. Thirty years of pressure and bitterness ignite an unstoppable chain reaction leading back to the night of the murder—and the truth. In a Temple of Trees is the story of secrets and their devastating aftermath on the powerful and the meek, husbands and wives, the living and the dead. About the Author As a graduate student, Suzanne Hudson won a Hackney Literary Award and a National Endowment for Arts and Humanities prize, and then withdrew from the publishing world for twenty-five years until the publication of a short story collection, Opposable Thumbs, in 2001. She is a contributor to Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe. A Georgia native, Suzanne currently lives in Baldwin County, Alabama. In a Temple of Trees is her first novel.