About Via Dolorosa by Kirill Khrestinin
Laura Jones left her grandfather’s ranch for Los Angeles, chasing a bigger life. The city fed her to its wolves — the man who sold her, the man in uniform who came through her door — and what was left of her ended up at the edge of the desert, where the only living thing is one ugly, stubborn tree that has no business being alive.
Around her ruin, other lives are breaking. Harry Dolan is a cop who can smell evil in every stranger but not in the partner beside him — and he is losing his daughter, his marriage, and his soul in slow motion. John Eagle wears the uniform of protection over the appetite of a predator. And Degory Jones, Laura’s grandfather — an old soldier carrying a fifty-year-old sin and a Purple Heart he calls his punishment — is about to commit one more killing. The kind a man doesn’t survive, even when he lives.
Via Dolorosa is a novel about what suffering does to people who have nothing to carry it with — the ones it breaks, the ones it turns into monsters, and the one woman who finds, at the end of the road of sorrows, something she had stopped believing in.
Unsparing, violent, and shot through with a strange, stubborn light, Via Dolorosa is a literary crime novel for readers drawn to the moral reckoning of Crime and Punishment and the generational wounds of East of Eden—a story about the darkness people make of this world, and the dawn that outlasts it.
Some roads only open at the bottom.
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Author Bio:
Kirill Khrestinin writes dark psychological fiction about people who shouldn’t be understood — and the ones who try anyway. A Russian-American author and filmmaker based in Louisville, Kentucky, his work explores violence, obsession, and the thin line between confession and performance. He studies artificial intelligence and brings that knowledge into his fiction — not as science fiction, but as psychological reality. His feature horror film The Ghost from Hovrino (2012), which he wrote, directed, produced, scored, and edited, is available on Prime Video. His books include Mythos, Dear AI, I Killed Her, Down by the Spiral, and Via Dolorosa.