The Women at Mile Nineteen

Summer, 1977. Nineteen miles south of the state line, women have built their own kind of safety net.

At the Lantern diner, the Hollis Motor Court, Brennan Service, and a tiny bus counter along an Appalachian interstate, Maxine Gentry and the women of Mile Nineteen trade what they know: which motels will take a woman alone, which drivers keep their word, where someone can wait until morning, and who can be trusted for a ride north.

Theresa "Tess" Larkin returns to Mile Nineteen with most of her belongings in the trunk, divorce papers in the glove compartment, and six weeks to decide what comes next.

Then a young woman named Lynette Barlow walks into the Lantern during a storm with one question:

Who told her Bluebird was safe?

There is only one problem. Bluebird was Harvey Kessler, a trusted trucker the women had known for years.

And Harvey has been dead since January.

As Tess and the women retrace motel records, repair slips, bus schedules, remembered conversations, and voices on the CB, they discover how easily reputation can become mistaken for evidence-and how dangerous certainty can be when someone else is making the decision for you.

Atmospheric and deeply human, The Women at Mile Nineteen is a historical suspense novel about women protecting one another, the limits of good intentions, and the right to leave a life without first proving it was bad enough.