From the Black Hills

the long version

A decent, ordinary life jeopardized by a catastrophic event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy tells in From the Black Hills. In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike must deal with his mother's distress, the insinuating methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, his longing for an older woman who lives nearby - and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what will happen if does.