Award-winning author Jenny Cafaro presents a Southern Gothic story:
The Bible of Blackwater County

They called her mudpuppy—a bottom-feeder, something that crawls through the muck and never comes clean. Trapped in a shack lined with newspaper after her daddy left the coal mines, fifteen-year-old Bessie was the oldest of eight—never expected to survive, let alone matter. Then she caught the eye of a man lurking in the shadows, older than her father. But she did both.
By eighteen, she'd earned her name in headlines alongside the murders. 1931 made Bessie Winter the scandal of Blackwater County. That mud never washed off.
Now, at the end of her life, Bessie has been saved and baptized—and she's finally telling the real story of that year. Not the lies the papers spread, but the choices that kept her alive, the story she let them believe, and the secret she's kept about the night her husband died.
A raw, haunting tale of survival, scandal, and the price of silence—for readers of Where the Crawdads Sing and The Great Alone.