Latest in Elkins series delivers

Julia Keller’s thrillers set in her native West Virginia never shy away from the region’s toughest problems.

The Bell Elkins series, which began in 2012 with “A Killing in the Hills,” largely has focused on the opioid epidemic. The title character, a county prosecutor and later private investigator, solves fictional crimes.

Keller’s newest — “The Cold Way Home,” the eighth in the series — mostly departs from drug problems to consider a horrendous surgery practiced in the late 1940s and '50s at psychiatric facilities.

In real life, West Virginia was at the forefront in performing lobotomies that were intended to temper people, especially women, with troublesome personalities. Walter Freeman, • “The Cold Way Home” (Minotaur Books, 306 pages, $27.99) by Julia Keller

called the “father of the lobotomy,” performed hundreds of “ice-pick surgeries” (reaching the brain through the eye) throughout West Virginia state hospitals.

Keller weaves that troubled period into her contemporary mystery. In the present day, a woman, whose ancestors had links to the Wellwood Psychiatric At a glance

• Julia Keller will appear at a book launch for “The Cold Way Home” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Gramercy Books, 2424 E. Main St. Call 614-867-5515 or visit gramercybooksbexley.com. The event is free.

Hospital where lobotomies were performed, is found brutally murdered near the ruins of the hospital. The circumstances are eerily familiar to the long-ago and unsolved murder of her grandmother.

Elkins, who in previous books after leaving the prosecutor’s office joined ranks with former sheriff Nick Fogelsong and former deputy Jake Oakes to work as private investigators, is called upon to look into the contemporary murder.

The case coincides with other plot threads: a missing teenage girl, a baby born in a fast-food restaurant to an addict, and domestic problems for Bell’s partners, Fogelsong and Oakes.

Excerpts from the diary of one of the murdered woman’s ancestors are neatly inserted in the narrative every so often, giving Bell clues to possible links between the crimes.

The novel moves quickly, but with the graceful character development and lyrical descriptions of rural and small-town West Virginia that readers have come to expect and appreciate from Keller.

Whether Elkins is tramping in the woods near what is left of the old Wellwood Hospital or hunkering down for coffee and pie at the diner with Fogelsong, the sense of time and place is beautifully and evocatively expressed.

negilson@gmail.com