The Apostasy

Leland Graves closes transactions. After millennia in service to The Great Unsigned Contract he's ready to form his own corporation and returns to Copper Gulch.

In 1929, Hattie Jackson lost her fiance to a lynch mob fomented by a double murder and the damning testimony of the itinerant preacher Leland Graves. In that era generations before, Hattie's Nana Sally Jackson, a former slave, shepherds young Hattie's rage away frown the townspeople and toward another culprit.

Today Hattie is the 94-year-old matriarch of a family that extends beyond her African-American relatives. Her adopted nephew, Thomas Brunson, returns to Vienna, Alabama after his medical discharge from the Air Force and a failed romance. Tom, a son-of-the-south ex-fighter pilot (young and white) and Hattie (old and African-American) make a curious pair in the Grimes Hospital emergency room after sudden heart difficulties leave Hattie dazed and confused...and with a foreboding she hasn't felt since 1929.

Leland Graves works for the corporation and has returned to Copper Gulch, the marshy area stagnating below Vienna. He intends on turning The Great Unsigned Contract on its ear by forming his own firm. But first he'll need to close the perfect transaction...the one that got away from when Sally Jackson was young.

A Rupert Hughes Writing Award Finalist (Maui Writers Conference)

Sandhills Writers' Conference award-winner