Think small towns are safe? Worry free havens?  Impervious to crime?  That’s what Kate Russell thought when she moved to idyllic Carystown, Kentucky.  In an attempt to escape her past and bury her own terrible secret, Russell hoped to become anonymous and in a sense disappear, says Isabella Moon’s author, Laura Benedict.  But the opposite occurs.  She quickly embroils herself in the town’s darker side.

Soon after Kate moves to Carystown, nine-year-old Isabella Moon disappears.  Russell thinks she knows where the body is and becomes a prime suspect. Another murder occurs that might be connected to Russell as well.

From there, the story is really about secrets and exposing secrets, says Benedict, whose original grain of the idea came from the Polly Klass case in California: the girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom. “I had a small daughter at the time,” says Benedict.  “Over the next fifteen years I noticed that whenever there was a case of a missing girl, the attending media attention became a circus that descended on these small towns.  I wondered how a small town changed in response to this kind of hyper attention?” 

Benedict, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, feels close to the landscape of the South.  She later moved to a small town in West Virginia and experienced how much living in a small town was akin to living in an extended family.  “People know things about each other—they know things that are shocking,” she says.  At the same time, she says, people learn to adapt and accept one another’s weirdnesses and eccentricities.  “It’s not literally incestuous but it becomes that way.”

Laura Benedict spent five years in sales and promotion and went through two marriages before she realized what she really wanted to do was write.  Since then, she has published essays and short stories and settled into a happy, third marriage.  Isabella Moon is her first novel.  She lives in rural Southern Illinois with her husband and two children. Read an excerpt here. (Click on Isabella Moon, then select excerpt.)