FROM THE DUST JACKET:

"Jack Olsen's particular gift is his ability to illuminate the souls of his characters." -- Jonathan Kellerman

How can ordinary people survive extraordinary trauma? Jack Olsen tracked a typical American family across four violent decades to find out.

Salt of the Earth is the true story of a courageous woman who survived a hellish twentieth-century nightmare. Mob violence, injustice, kidnapping, murder, and suicide were the black holes in the awful astronomy of Elaine Gere's life. Somehow she had to summon the courage to endure: to honor her beloved dead and to rebuild the shattered lives of the sons who depended on her strength.

Jack Olsen has been lauded for his psychological insights into the most violent criminals in such previous masterworks as Doc, The Misbegotten Son, and Predator, but he has never overlooked their victims. By viewing the world through the eyes of Elaine Gere and her devastated family, he finds the core values that enabled them not only to survive and flourish, but, in the end, to triumph. Salt of the Earth is a remarkable saga of indomitability, an inspiring and cathartic elegy to the increasing numbers of Americans whose lives are transformed by violence.

A REVIEW

By Fiona Webster, True Crime Editor, Amazon.com
Visit Fiona's WWW site: True Crime Is Ugly (but fun to read about)

The title of this book refers neither to the murderer who destroyed the hard-won tranquility of a young couple and their three children, nor to the 12-yr-old victim, but to the victim's mother. Without subtracting an iota from the uniqueness of her story, Jack Olsen portrays Elaine Gere as one of those heroically strong American women whose lives usually pass unheralded. We follow her indomitable spirit from a childhood in squalor, to marriage and family, to the disappearance of her daughter, through the baffling and enervating aftermath of a high-profile crime, through the years when her devastated husband flounders in alcoholism and turns violent, to the final healing of her broken family. David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars, writes, "Salt of the Earth constitutes a literary achievement of the highest order. It is the complexity of life, its mystery and beauty, its violence and love and terrible strangeness, that Jack Olsen forces to confront here."

Copyright © Amazon.com, Inc. 1997