You Believers

By Jane Bradley

Unbridled Books (May 2010)
Spring 2011 Catalog Copy:

When a young woman goes missing, a professional searcher with uncanny empathetic skill works heroically to find her.

You Believers is a powerful cathartic story of casual evil and how the worst things can be faced so that one might not only survive but grow. A young woman goes missing, and her mother uproots her life to find her daughter. But it is not just the heartbreak or the deep mystery of the hunt for lost loved ones that Bradley so convincingly explores. Rather, with the help of an amazingly dedicated searcher, family and friends somehow learn to move past unspeakable horror and celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit. Offering a vision that is at once ruthless and utterly compassionate, Bradley renders the search for logic, meaning, redemption and even hope in the domino force that is human nature.

Part Southern gothic, part crime, part haunting suspense story, You Believers takes readers on a harrowing journey that rewards the reader with insight into how we might endure horrible events with faith, strength and grace even while it reveals the ripple effects of random violence.

"It’s classic, almost. Like the story of Persephone picking flowers in a field one spring afternoon. The earth opens..."
(Click here to read full excerpt You Believers, featured in the catalog copy)

Jane Bradley - "You Believers" from WPCR-PortClintonRadio.com on Vimeo.

You Believers

is now available as an audiobook from
Amazon.com and Recordedbooks.com

...Chosen as a favorite book in 2011
St Louis Dispatch and The Kansas City Star

Interviews with Jane Bradley

Talking About Missing Persons, Professional Searchers
and Faith With Jane Bradley, Author of You Believers
An Interview by Lois Alter Mark
*Above interview also featured at: Stylesubstanceandsoul.com *

An Interview with Author Jane Bradley
by Mindy Winthrow

YOU BELIEVERS: Q & A with author Jane Bradley
An Interview by Karen Spears Zacharias

My First Time: Jane Bradley
An Interview by David Abrams

Mx3 Guest Post: Jane Bradley, Author of You Believers
Guest blog by Jane Bradley

2011: The Year In Villains, Jedediah-Ayres

Jesse Hollowfield ~ one of the best bad guys of 2011 in St. Louis.

Be sure to check out Jane Bradley's
upcoming events!

Reviews of You Believers

Jodi Picoult, author of SING YOU HOME and HOUSE RULES

"YOU BELIEVERS examines the anatomy of a horrific crime from every angle: the victim, the perpetrator, the family members left behind, and the tenacious searcher whose job it is to bring closure. Several perfectly pitched Southern narratives weave together to form a strong song of love, loss, and human resilience. A gripping, intense read."

Scott Phillips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

"You Believers is a splendid crime novel. Jane Bradley has an exceptional feel for time and place and language, a real gift for suspenseful plotting, and most importantly a talent for writing real human beings."

William Gay, author of The Long Home, I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down, and a Southern gothic novel, Twilight, says of You Believers:

“Beautifully written and profoundly felt, this eloquent novel lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.”

Mindy Withrow, author at Mindy Withrow.com

“ What, if anything, consoles you in your darkest hour? The human capacity to believe—to ascribe purpose to deity or destiny—in the face of evil and deepest loss is the thread that binds Jane Bradley’s debut novel, You Believers.”

More from Withrow review

"...What, if anything, consoles you in your darkest hour? The human capacity to believe—to ascribe purpose to deity or destiny—in the face of evil and deepest loss is the thread that binds Jane Bradley’s debut novel, You Believers.

One young woman believes she can survive anything if she just stays positive.

Another believes a voice from the dead saved her life.

A man believes he is untouchable, a fearless devil with a right and a destiny to control others.

A formerly devout mother shakily returns to Christian faith when her daughter goes missing.

A search and rescue worker who experiences the best and worst of humanity believes in moving forward anyway, one day at a time.

The story begins on a summer day when Katy Connor goes out shopping and never returns. People go missing every day, says the narrator, Shelby Waters:

It happens like that. You think you’re going home. And some picture of your face ends up on a grainy black-and-white flyer tacked to a phone pole. Your image fades in sunlight. The thin paper sign of you tatters, fluttering in the breeze. Strangers pass by, study your face for something familiar, think maybe they’ve seen you somewhere. But they haven’t. You are a stranger. You are lost.

Shelby knows. She faced that personal loss years ago and now faces it daily on her clients’ behalf. She’s the hardscrabble private detective you call “when you’ve got nothing left but worry and waiting for the phone to ring.” When Katy Connor goes missing and the police believe she’s run off with a drug-dealer boyfriend, Katy’s fiancé Billy and mother Livy turn to Shelby to take up the search.

Despite their shared loss, Billy and Livy cannot grieve and wait together. As the empty weeks stretch on, Livy returns to the Bible verses that used to sustain her, telling herself to focus on the positive, to have faith, to pray harder, convinced God will reward her sacrifices. Billy, meanwhile, drinks himself under the table, lashing out at Livy and his friends for their stiff politeness, their ungrounded positivity, their false assurances.

They were saying something about time. Oh, God, Livy was saying something about in the Lord’s own time. She was trying to climb back into her religion, like religion was a tree you could climb into to keep you safe from a flood. Billy couldn’t stand any more of anyone’s words that kept trying to say everything was going to be all right.

Shelby does what she can to support both of them without taking her eyes off the end game: finding Katy’s body. She, too, has her own way of facing the worst. She trusts her gut. She puts one foot in front of the other. She stocks her truck with Valium, blankets, shovels. In one emotional scene, when Livy asks her if she believes in anything, she replies, “I believe in a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like the world of the living.”
“That’s a start,” she said. “No afterlife?”
“I believe in the living and the dead.”
“Do you believe in spirits? Is that why you do this, to put lost souls to rest?”
“I do what I do to put the living to rest.”
So Shelby continues her search, interviewing, visiting Katy’s favorite places, following the cadaver dogs through the woods. There’s no need for a spoiler alert here. The reader knows from the first page that Katy will not be coming home, yet Bradley maintains a taut suspense and an increasing pace in her slow revelation of details. She also builds strong empathy for her broken characters, including those that have caused so much devastation to others. The diversity and complexities of their responses to loss are the emotional engine driving the story forward.

So whose beliefs are “right”? In the end, Bradley’s characters survive not because of the substance of their faith, but simply because of its existence. Livy’s prayers do not bring her daughter back. Shelby’s relentless search and rescue work doesn’t end her own suffering. But each person finds something to commit to, and that commitment gives them a reason to go on surviving.

You Believers is an intensely quiet thriller that dignifies the human spirit even as it reveals the darkest impulses and contradictions of the soul.

This book review is cross-posted at The Discarded Image. "

More Reviews of You Believers, by Jane Bradley:

     "In her heartbreaking first novel, Bradley (Power Lines) takes an unflinching look at the nightmare of the missing person. When Katy Connor fails to come home, her fiancé is quick to assume she's run off with another man. But after days go by, Katy's mother, Livy, gets the police involved, and a complicated narrative unfolds. Many voices tell this story, from Katy's captors, a troubled young man and his wayward side-kick, to Katy herself, but the most striking narrator is Shelby Waters, a tough Southern woman who runs an organization dedicated to finding the missing and helping their families cope. As she attempts to keep Livy from falling apart, the brutal rape and assault of a young woman in a nearby gated community raises the stakes. The investigation progresses, but the chances of finding Katy dwindle, hope fades, and Shelby and Livy are forced to confront the reality that men rape women for fun and daughters go missing in the blink of an eye. Told bluntly from a cast of honest characters, Bradley's novel is haunting."
- Publishers Weekly, (May)

     “Multiple voices are employed to stunning effect in this novel of those who are lost and those who find. Bradley’s powerful writing catapults the story of a missing young woman into an engrossing character study that examines in meaningful and sometimes unexpectedly moving ways the actions of all the players in the story: those who love and miss her; those who search for her with their own versions of hope; and those who are responsible for her being lost. The voice of Shelby Waters, the finder, is particularly strong, and resonates with equal parts compassion, hope, and world-weariness. Thank you, Ms. Bradley, for being bold enough to allow your characters to have all their gray areas. When a writer trusts her readers enough to do that it’s an honor to spend time lost in their words.”
- Eleanor Lucas, Capitol Books & News

     "When a young woman vanishes without a trace, eventually she becomes another unsolved case. Not for Shelby Waters, the relentless narrator of this intense suspense debut. Shelby never stops searching. Sometimes the trail ends in heartbreak, but any answer is better than the gnawing uncertainty that they should have looked harder, a little bit longer, more closely. YOU BELIEVERS explores the dark side of how things can go wrong very quickly, and how even the simplest of lives can be turned inside out when evil knocks at the door."
- Geoffrey Jennings, Rainy Day Books

     "You Believers is a damn good read. It has all the elements that keep the reader glued to the seat, ignoring pressing obligations—well-drawn, intriguing characters, sweaty palms-suspenseful scenes, dark humor, and poignant sorrow. This story lingers with the reader long after the book is closed, and returns again and again with every 'Missing' headline."
— Laura DeVault,
Over the Moon Bookstore & Artisan Gallery
Crozet, VA

     "Bradley takes a new approach to the story of a missing person by voicing (in a distinct and lovely way) each person affected by the event—the victim, the perpetrator, the victim’s fiancee, the victim’s mother and best of all, Shelby Waters, a searcher for lost persons. When the police believe that Katy Conley has run away rather than been taken, the family contacts Shelby who has spent the biggest part of her life looking for the missing. Sometimes she finds them and other times they stare at her out of the pictures hung on the walls of her home/office. The book takes a difficult subject and makes it riveting and satisfying. We all end up believing in something and sometimes something must be lost before something else can be found."
- Vicki Erwin, Main Street Books

     "Shelby Waters is a searcher, the last person a family turns to when a loved one has gone missing and all avenues of inquiry have failed. Shelby’s quest takes the reader through a world of random violence and evil, a realm that is all too real in today’s society. This is a novel of high intensity, yet also one of great compassion and empathy as people try to come to terms with the worst that is possible in life."
— Bill Cusumano, Nicola’s Books

Jedidiah Ayres, B & N Community

Meg Pokrass, Fictionaut Five

Joni Rodgers, Boxing the Octopus

Steve Wienburg, Cleveland.com

Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

SuziQoregon, Whimpulsive

You Believers may be pre-ordered from Barnes and Noble, www.unbridledbooks.com or Amazon.com , or your favorite bookseller.

You Believers....to be translated into Slovak!

Les Editions de Seuil...translating and publishing You Believers into French

Coming Soon!

Ten percent of author proceeds from the novel are donated to CUE.

Click here to read Jane's essay on the writing of You Believers, as well as a full excerpt from the novel:
“A Story of CUE: Finding Faith in You Believers.”

Click to read more on Jane Bradley

You Believers

You Believers

...Chosen as a favorite book in 2011 St Louis Dispatch and The Kansas City Star

Interviews with Jane Bradley

2011: The Year In Villains, Jedediah-Ayres

Reviews of You Believers

...Chosen as a favorite book in 2011
St Louis Dispatch and The Kansas City Star