An Edgar Award–winning author’s true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed.
Kentucky never deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” more than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with a substantial amount of money he had stashed away in a safe over his lifetime.
The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Bakers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. They found that all the cash came in handy soon after when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated Lester Burns, into representing them.
“An arresting look into the troubled psyches of these criminals and into the depressed Kentucky economy that became fertile territory for narcotics dealers, theft rings and bootleggers.” —Publishers Weekly
“First-rate . . . The smell of wet, coal-laden earth, white lightening, and cocaine-driven sweat arises from these marvelously atmospheric—and compelling—pages.” —Kirkus Reviews
“O’Brien creates a fascinating portrait of the mountain way of life and thought that forged the lives of these criminals.” —Library Journal
