Scott Howard @RealScottHoward - Twitter Profile

Some Secrets Don't Stay Buried After three years of writing — and a lifetime of listening — I'm finally ready to tell you about the book. I've lived in Athens long enough to know how this town keeps its stories. Quietly. At the back of the restaurant. In the pew behind you at a funeral. In the long pause before somebody changes the subject and asks if you want another drink. For a lot of years I've been listening to those pauses. Turns out, they add up to a novel. It's called Murder of One. It's coming. The book is a Southern gothic crime thriller set right here — our streets, our oaks, our old money, our older grudges. It circles one question this town has been stepping around for more than thirty years: What really happened to Jenny Stone? You may not know that name. That's kind of the point. In Athens, Georgia, some secrets are worth killing for. Others are worth dying to expose. That's the tagline. I wrote it after the tenth time I hit a wall trying to learn a piece of history that — on paper — should have been public record. It was the sentence that told me I wasn't writing a crime story. I was writing this town. What the book is about It's 1992. Jenny Stone is twenty-two years old. And then she isn't. The case closes. The town mourns, and then the town moves on, the way towns do when the truth would be more expensive than the lie. Thirty years pass. Somebody starts asking questions again. Some of those somebodies would rather they didn't. That's the setup. The rest is what you came for. Why now I'll say more about this in the weeks ahead, but the short version is: I wrote this book because I kept running into the same wall. The wall where public records turn into private understandings. The wall where the people who know what happened have agreed, without ever quite agreeing out loud, that nothing happened at all. If you've spent any time in a small Southern town, you know the wall I'm talking about. Murder of One is what it looks like when one person decides to stop walking around it. What I need from you, right now 1. Get on the list. Head to [email protected] and drop your email. When the book goes live, list members get the first-chapter preview, launch-day pricing, and an invite to the Athens release event before I open it up to anyone else. 2. Tell one person. Forward this post to somebody who reads thrillers. Somebody who's from here. Somebody who loves a good secret. Just one. If everyone on this list does that, the book has a shot. 3. Write me back. Hit reply and tell me what you're reading right now — and if there's a Southern story you've always thought somebody should've told by now. I read every response. I want to know who's in this room with me. More soon. A lot more. Chapter excerpts. Behind-the-scenes on the research (and there was a lot of research). A couple of things about Jenny Stone that aren't in the book because I couldn't print them. Grab a chair in the back of the restaurant. I'll be telling the story for a while. — Scott