13 1/2 - 7197

With 13 ¿, Nevada Barr, New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels, has written a taut and terrifying psychological thriller. It carries the reader from horrifying 1970's murder spree of a child-dubbed "Butcher Boy" by a shocked public- in Rochester, Minnesota, to Polly, the abused daughter of Mississippi "trailer trash," to post-Katrina New Orleans. In Jackson Square in the French Quarter, a tarot card reader told Polly Deschamps she would be a success. Thirty years later, Polly is a respected professor of literature with good friends and her own home- a safe life for her and her two daughters. Butcher Boy, released on his seventeenth birthday, shook the snow from his boots and headed south. New Orleans, a Mecca for runaways then and now, offers sanctuary but never forgiveness. When Polly falls in love with Marshall Marchland, a restoration architect who is helping to rebuild her adopted city, shadows of the past rise out of the poisoned ground of New Or