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The Kept

The Kept

Summary

How far would you go for your family, for love, for revenge?

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York.

Elspeth Howell returns home to find her family brutally murdered. The only survivor is her twelve-year-old son who witnessed it all.

Wounded, frightened and with retribution in their hearts, mother and son set out into the frozen wilderness to track down the red-scarfed men who killed their loved ones in cold blood.

Their journey leads them to a rough-hewn settlement on the edge of ice-filled Lake Erie, a merciless place where violence abounds. Here, forced into a brutal adulthood, Caleb begins to discover truths about his mother he could never have anticipated and Elspeth must finally confront the terrible urges that envelop her. All the while, the memory of Caleb’s brothers and sisters presses him onwards.

Big skies, deep snow, open wounds: The Kept delves deep into what it means to be a mother – and to be a son. It asks us how far we would go for our family, for love and, ultimately, for revenge?

Reviews

  • A classily written crime novel that is also an atmospheric evocation of a bygone era.
    The Sunday Times

About the author

James Scott

James Scott is Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Texas at Austin. James is a statistician and data scientist who studies Bayesian inference and computational methods for big data. His has collaborated with scientists in a wide variety of fields, including health care, nuclear security, linguistics, political science, finance, management, infectious disease, astronomy, neuroscience, transportation and molecular biology. He has also worked with clients across many different industries, from tech startups to large multinational firms. James lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Abigail.
His academic research has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, Fox, the BBC UK, BBC World News, Radio 4, The Guardian and many other prominent media outlets.
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