Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere

Fans of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and John Berendt's In the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantine's Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. For well over twenty years Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, and wondering the big whys. At age forty-six he finally settled with his Mexican wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America and its people, but one day in 2006 his neighbor, Steven Haaja, a math professor from the local state college, disappeared. 95 days later the professor was found burned to death and tied to a tree in the hills behind the campus where he taught. No one, law enforcement included, understood the circumstances. Poe had never contemplated writing mystery or true crime, but since he knew all the players, the suspects, the sheriff, the police involved, he and his kindergarten son set out to find out what might have happened. Love and Terror is not only a six-year examination of this case, but of Poe's eccentric High Plains town, its kooky residents, his rocky marriage to a beautiful Mexican woman, and his purportedly autistic son.