Welcome to Litsy!

A small town in the Mojave Desert three hours east of Los Angeles, Twentynine Palms is headquarters for the Joshua Tree National Park and home to the world's largest U.S. Marine Corps base. In 1991, against this starkly beautiful landscape, a troubled marine with a long history of sexual violence named Valentine Underwood murdered two young women -- one of whom would have turned 16 the next morning.Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she explores not only the murders and the three families involved, but a rootless culture -- filled with fatherless families, shattered dreams, and constant violence -- that embodies base towns like Twentynine Palms. In haunting, vivid prose, she creates a far-reaching story of America itself: of modern nomads -- disenfranchised women looking for jobs and men -- a violence-tinged military culture and its code of silence, and Western desert spaces that beckon to those who dream of reinventing themselves.