Dark Debts

In Dark Debts, Karen Hall masterfully combines southern gothic, romantic comedy, and mystery in a wildly original theological thriller that has become a cult favorite since being published twenty years ago. In this new anniversary edition, the author has reimagined her work. The result is a suspenseful, irreverent, and deeply spiritual novel that captivates from the very beginning and doesn't let go.

When Randa, a reporter for an alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, receives an urgent phone call from her estranged lover, Cam, she rushes to his apartment. She arrives to discover that he's leapt from the building to his death. Police believe that before committing suicide, Cam also murdered someone in a convenience store, but Randa does not believe Cam is capable of such an act. She seeks out Cam's brother, Jack, who is living off the grid, somewhere near Atlanta, in hope of figuring out what really happened.

Meanwhile, a Jesuit priest named Michael Kinney has been exiled from New York City to the boondocks of Georgia after making controversial public statements. He has said things that educated people of faith are not supposed to express. Even more problematically, he has fallen in love with a woman, and the last surviving member of his family has kept a shocking family secret from him.

How these characters converge is part of the thrilling mystery of Dark Debts, a cult favorite first published twenty years ago. In this new edition, author Karen Hall has re-imaged her southern gothic tale and the result is a work of even greater power-a brilliantly realized and suspenseful evocation of the conflict between good and evil.

About the Author

Karen is a screenwriter/producer, a novelist and a mom. This is her 35th year of making a living as a writer and she hope it lasts until someone throws dirt on her coffin. (Actually, she'd like it to last past that.) She married her high school sweetheart, Chris Walker, twenty-five years after he should have married her. (He would not listen to reason at age 17.) Counting the "yours, mine and ours" kids, they have four altogether (Christine, Brian, Julianne and Caleb) with ages ranging from fourteen to thirty.

They live in the North Carolina mountains with the fourteen year-old, where they have a dog, a cat, two horses and a pond full of rainbow trout. And a bear. (They live in the woods.) In her screenwriting life, she currently working on a kung-fu movie (yes, she said kung fu movie) and a miniseries about the unsaintly years of St. Ignatius. Obviously she is a woman of eclectic tastes.