ANDREA PORTES reads from BURY THIS

Bury This (Soft Skull Press)

If twenty-five years can discover the internet, the cell phone, this thing called the iPod, can twenty-five years discover the secret of a girl murdered, abandoned, by the side of the road? That is the haunting premise of Bury This, an impressionistic literary thriller about the murder of a young girl in small-town Michigan in 1979.

Beth Krause was by all intents a good little girl - member of the church choir, beloved daughter of doting parents, friend to the downtrodden. But dig a little deeper into any small town, and conflicts and jealousies begin to appear. And somewhere is that heady mix lies the answer to what really happened to Beth Krause. Her unsolved murder becomes the stuff of town legend, and twenty-five years later the case is re-ignited when a group of film students start making a documentary on Beth's fateful life. The town has never fully healed over the loss of Beth, and the new investigation calls into light several key characters: her father, a WWII vet; her mother, once the toast of Manhattan; her best friend, abandoned by her mother and left to fend for herself against an abusive father; and the detective, just a rookie when the case broke, haunted by his inability to bring Beth's murderer to justice. All of these passions will collide once the identity of Beth's murderer is revealed, proving once again that some secrets can never stay buried.

Adrea Portes was born in rural Nebraska, and spent her early years living in Illinois, Texas, North Dakota, North Carolina, Rio de Janiero, and Brasilia. Portes attended Bryn Mawr and received her MFA from UC San Diego. She is the author of the semi-autobiographical novelHick, and has also completed the comic book series Super Rad, which will be released in September 2013 by Dark Matter.