Naked Among the Pines

Naked Among the Pines A novel by Steve Kitts Coldwater Gap, North Carolina, November. A nine-year-old girl in a red coat vanishes into the national forest chasing a white deer no one else believes is real. The town finds her pink bicycle on the porch of the local outcast: Edgward Torrance, a reclusive, naked, half-mad hermit who has not worn clothes since his wife left him six winters ago. Within days the sheriff has a signed confession, the county has a monster, and a little girl everyone loves is declared dead without a body ever being found. Only one person refuses to accept the story the town is telling itself: Melody Minoit, twenty-six, broke, and the only lawyer willing to defend a man the whole world has already hanged in its heart. What follows is a trial by fire and yellow ribbon, where truth walks barefoot, justice wears orange, and the forest keeps secrets older than blame. In the end, the pines give back what they took, but only after teaching an entire community the hardest lesson of all: Sometimes the craziest thing a person can do is love someone the rest of the world has decided is already lost. A haunting, redemptive Southern Gothic about grief, grace, and the stubborn refusal to let another human being disappear; whether into the woods or into the stories we tell to keep ourselves comfortable. View Less