Raven’s Last Act, a novel.

When a disgraced movie star shoots an intruder only to discover he is a young man she has been mentoring, a community in crisis must wrestle with its demons to get to the heart of the tragedy.

Raven Alberti, a former starlet, has recently relocated to her Cherokee husband’s small hometown on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border to provide her two young children an authentic life and find her own identity after spending her formative years in Hollywood. In Arkansas, she struggles to find her role amidst a niche southern culture that worships and loathes her in equal measures. Then she befriends Jesse Gatlin, the town’s other celebrity, a former Olympic hopeful who broke his back and is grieving the loss of his dream. Together, they seek to capture aspects of the normal adolescence they never had.

When Jesse invades Raven’s country home one summer day while her husband is gone, she blindly shoots him, putting him in a coma. The tragedy renders Raven’s youngest daughter mute, her husband distrustful, and her eldest daughter resentful of her father, effectively splitting the family in two. As the community and the law rush in to determine culpability, secrets bleed from each family. A prosecutor dissects Raven and Jesse’s relationship in a contentious trial. To reassemble her life, she must fall back on the one talent she sought to leave behind—she’s going to have to act.