Author Transports You To 1973 Beaumont

Delpha Wade had returned to Beaumont in need of a jobm after spending 14 years in the women's prison at Gatesville for manslaughter - a crime for which she had a good reason, but not good enough for the law to ignore. Beaumont - the city itself - is very much a character in this noir novel of corruption, betrayal, morality and how it bends, but doesn't break. Delpha is 32, having spent her life since the age of 18 in prison after plunging a knife into a man who was forcing himself on her. Sandlin is a 1969 graduate of French High School, which also was the setting of a previous work called "Message to the Nurse of Dreams," which was about the stirrings of public school integration and her friendship with the first black girl to attend an all-white campus. While some writers might build their mystery stories from the end with a solution and trace back to the beginning to add atmosphere and trails to nowhere, Sandlin said she prefers to imagine where her characters are going and takes them places. Will there be more of Delpha and Tom amid the inter-related cops, lawyers, refinery workers, wheelers, dealers and stealers?