The Evilling

This novel begins in 1960 with two killings four hundred miles apart: one in the Marble Mountains in Northern California, the other in Orangevale, a suburb of Sacramento. Both killings are self-defense. The one in Orangevale committed by twelve-year-old Billy Walker is accidental, but that does nothing to relieve the guilt he carries into his early forties, when he's forced to kill again.After his parents drowning in the American River during the flood of 1964, and the death of his...
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This novel begins in 1960 with two killings four hundred miles apart: one in the Marble Mountains in Northern California, the other in Orangevale, a suburb of Sacramento. Both killings are self-defense. The one in Orangevale committed by twelve-year-old Billy Walker is accidental, but that does nothing to relieve the guilt he carries into his early forties, when he's forced to kill again.After his parents drowning in the American River during the flood of 1964, and the death of his wife and two daughters off an icy mountain road into a canyon in 1977, Billy finds a home a year later on the outskirts of a small town called Poverty, on the Klamath River in Northern California.Living in a mobile home on Tanah's land for the past fifteen years, Billy tries to hold his ghosts and guilt at bay. Billy's simple life revolves around his adopted family: Elliot, a black man; his Modoc wife, Tanah; and their daughter, Maria, now twenty-five.During a span of twelve days, two unrelated matters complicate Billy's life: witnessing the killing of four Drug Enforcement Agency personnel, and finding out Maria is pregnant with his child. But these are nothing compared to the third problem closing in, forcing Billy to reach into his childhood and struggle with the moral decision of his life: to kill with intent.