A riveting and intricate debut that deftly interweaves a trio of voices - haunting, dangerous and full of longing in their own ways - all somehow linked by a shocking crime and the need to escape the past.
'The first day I saw Charlie behind our house with a .22 in his hand there was a whisper of the way things would go.'
In 1958, as the snow fell across Nebraska, a 19-year-old James Dean look-alike and his 14-year-old girlfriend climbed into a stolen car and blazed into history with a string of bloody murders that would haunt America. Many years have passed since the bitterly cold winter when Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate drove across the hushed Nebraskan landscape leaving a trail of blood. So why does Lowell, a Manhattan antiques collector, still dream of what happened, despite his wife's attempts to help him? And who is Puggy, the young girl obsessed by the story of the murders who wonders if she'll ever be loved like Starkweather loved his girl? And then there's Caril-Ann herself, who tells us her story - from the day she first met Charlie, dangling her bare legs off the edge of a treehouse, to the killing spree she swears she could not control. It ended outside Valentine, Nebraska, on that night when she still hoped that somehow life could go back to normal . . .
This extraordinarily mature and gripping novel tells the before and after of a tragic event, and shows how the effects of violence can linger on. Disturbing and intense, and with a touch of 'Those Lovely Bones', 'Outside Valentine' is a story of devastating losses and the power of love.
