Primary Format: Cloth
ISBN: 9781611687156
Published: 09/01/2015
Pages: 336
Size: 6 x 9 in.
Subject(s):

In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town


Richard Adams Carey

E-book: $9.99
Cloth: $29.95
Purchase
On the afternoon of August 19, 1997, John Harrigan—owner and publisher of the News and Sentinel newspaper in Colebrook, New Hampshire—arrived at his building to find the woman he loved lying dead in the parking lot. Lawyer Vickie Bunnell had been shot and killed by a local carpenter wielding an assault rifle. By then, three more people were already dead or dying. More mayhem was to ensue in an afternoon of plot twists too improbable for a novel. The roots of the incident stretch back twenty-five years, with tendrils deep in the history of New England’s North Country. These bloody events shocked America and made headlines across the world. Hundreds of local citizens became unwilling players in the drama—friends and colleagues of the dead, men and women who were themselves real or potential targets, along with their neighbors in law enforcement—but the town and its inhabitants were never passive victims. From the first shot fired that day, they remained courageously determined to survive. This is the story of that town, those people, and that day. In the Evil Day is a moving portrait of small-town life and familiar characters forever changed by sudden violence.

Carey’s tension-filled report of a small town’s terror is portrayed with surprising love, bittersweetness, and hope, resulting in a beautifully written and enthralling true-crime tale.
—Booklist (starred review)

Carey writes with empathy and insight about how the town endured the shootings, and how it rebounded.
—Valley News

Thanks to fine writing, great story-telling and incredible research, the lives and spirits of the victims and all those wounded and traumatized are fully rendered. It’s a book well worth your time.
—New Hampshire Magazine

Riveting and absolutely heartbreaking. . . . [Carey] does a masterful job of describing the bucolic but rugged setting of New Hampshire’s own "wild frontier" and the people and personalities attracted to it.
—New Hampshire Union Leader

In the Evil Day is as much the story of a town, its culture, its way of life, its history, but especially its people, as it is an in-depth cautionary tale of the tragic consequences of nursing a grudge. It's the most authentic, gripping, true-to-life modern-day murder documentary I've ever read.
—Ernest Hebert, author of The Darby Chronicles

RICHARD ADAMS CAREY is assistant director of the MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. His previous books include Raven’s Children: An Alaskan Culture at Twilight, Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman, and The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire.

Of Related Interest