Stella works miracles. Literally. She heals the sick and the paralysed, just like in the Bible. The Vatican is overjoyed--imagine, a real saint in the 21st century, and in Georgia, the heart of the American South.
The only hitch? Her method: she heals the people she sleeps with in her motorhome. And she sleeps with a lot of people, it's what she does for a living. And that's precisely what's bothering the Vatican.
For Luis Molina of the Savannah News, this story smells like a Pulitzer for sure. For the Vatican, it smells more like trouble. A saintly hooker isn't exactly presentable. A martyred saint, on the other hand, has a conveniently rewritten past. That's a job tailor-made for the Bronski twins--the best contract killers in the business. Provided, of course, they manage to get their hands on innocent little Stella. America is a big place.
Joseph Incardona sets his new story in a dusty, wacky United States. He excels in its film noir atmosphere: travelling funfairs on the outskirts of small towns forgotten by everyone, lost motels, freaks and the disenfranchised. It's reminiscent of the Coen brothers, Tarantino and del Toro, but also a homage to the novels of Harry Crews.
"Swiss author Joseph Incardona's hybrid chase-thriller-meets-satire is energetically translated from the French by Sam Taylor. Beyond the picaresque storyline, Incardona ensures that Stella has both agency and emotional intelligence. She poignantly records the details of each encounter in her notebook. "Because two bodies merging like that was never nothing, never insignificant, no matter what anyone says or thinks." Financial Times, Thrillers of the Month
