Cathy Loves This Debut Novel

 

Mary Byrd Thornton could understand how a reporter couldn’t resist the story: a nine-year-old boy sexually molested and killed on Mother's Day, 1966. A suspect to whom nothing would stick. A neighborhood riddled with secrets. No one, especially the bungling or complicit authorities, had been able to solve the crime. Now, thirty years later, the reporter’s call will reel a reluctant Mary Byrd from Mississippi back to Virginia where she must confront her family—and, once again, the murder’s irremovable stain of tragedy.

Lisa Howorth’s remarkable Flying Shoes is a work of fiction, but the murder is based on the still-unsolved case of her stepbrother, a front page story in the Washington Post. And yet this is not a crime novel; it is an honest and luminous story of a particular time and place in the South, where even calamitous weather can be a character, everyone has a story, and all are inextricably entwined.

 

With a flamboyant cast, splendid dark humor, a potent sense of history, and a shocking true story at its heart, Flying Shoes is a rich and candid novel from a fresh new southern voice about family and memory and one woman’s flight from a wounded past.

 

Cathy says:

"Lisa Howarth's debut novel Flying Shoes is a Southern feast for the mind.   As Howarth's mystery of the brutal death of a nine-year-old boys unfolds the reader meets unforgettable characters, most notably Mary Byrd Thornton a feisty, flawed and often foul-mouthed wife, mother and step-sister of the murdered child who is very reluctantly revisiting the event after 30 years.

 

Flying Shoes artfully steers the reader through some of the idiosyncracies of life in a southern town and deals with social  and racial issues with the honest and humor that only an insider can offer."