Ring of Night

"This novel is dangerous, devastating, and deeply alive—literary crime fiction at its very best." —Ivy Pochoda, bestselling author of Sing Her Down

After her sister’s body is found in an abandoned house, a young boxer unravels a shocking web of family secrets in a twisty, harrowing crime novel from the literary iconoclast Laura van den Berg.

Sometimes survival is an ugly thing. Especially in Florida.

Tina Chance knows what it takes to succeed: routine, determination, strategy. One of the most promising female boxers in the country, she’s the pride of her heat-and-rain-soaked Florida town, a place of peeling paint and half-empty bars. She couldn’t be more different from her vivacious yet troubled older sister, Angela, who spends her nights drinking in a converted hearse with a group of shady locals. Still, though, she’s Tina’s only sister. And then Angela’s body is found mangled and stuffed into the wall of an abandoned Victorian mansion, and Tina’s world collapses.

Furious with the detectives’ lack of progress, Tina begins a clandestine investigation that takes her into the darkest corners of her town. There are leads—the discovery of a car in a swamp, an ambiguous voicemail—with no answers. Something, no matter how hard she looks, isn’t adding up. That is, until a stranger with a fake name and a secret past arrives in town chasing her own, ostensibly unrelated investigation. Neither woman knows it, but their destinies are already intertwined—and might even unlock the horrific truth of what really happened to Angela and who was responsible.

A hot-blooded and devastating crime thriller that turns as quickly, and unpredictably, as the Florida weather, Laura van den Berg's Ring of Night is a sojourn into the heart of human survival, and a gripping exploration of the line between freedom and fate.