David Schaefer

Xavie David Schaefer

The year is 1935, during the very heart of America's Great Depression. Randal Knox has been wandering the country looking for any sort of work to keep body and soul together. His journey has taken him from his home in upstate New York to a tiny backwater deep in the bayous of Louisiana called Bailey Bottoms. Knox is willing to take on any job, no matter how large or small, but he also has one advantage ... he is a talented violin teacher. He has found that, even in the toughest of times, people are still willing to pay what they can for his musical services. One such unlikely music student is a pint-sized ball of fire named Rainy Breaux ... all of six years old and certainly a mystery in and of herself ... who serves him coffee at a local diner and offers to do his laundry in exchange for violin lessons. She has vowed to learn to play the fiddle, as she calls it, "as good as that girl." Knox soon finds himself smack in the middle of a mystery no one alive could ever have imagined. He also finds himself hopelessly in love with ... "that girl" ... from the very moment he lays eyes on her ... the most amazing and mysterious person he has ever met in his young life. Hired by her father to teach this strange girl to play the violin, Knox must first find the key to unlocking the mystery of how she has somehow managed to ensnare all of Bailey Bottoms in a conspiracy of silence. In his fourth novel, David Schaefer has taken us back to a much simpler place in time, when dirt poor, rural communities looked out for their own and local gossip spread like wild fire through the wagging tongues of a nameless, faceless grapevine. Bailey Bottoms turns out to be a community like no other.