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They Was Holdin' Hands
By
Venera Di Bella Barles

This highly emotional dark novel brought tears to my eyes and took me on a roller coaster ride of a read! I couldn't wait to see how this book ended.

Kathy Boswell
Managing Editor, The Best Reviews

Decades of tangled lives and dark secrets fill this wonderfully complex novel with depth and texture and emotion. Brava, Ms.  Di Bella Barles, well done!

Victoria Dark
Author, Dangerous to Love

Their lives were shaped by poverty as harsh as the Schuylkill  County winter. Their deaths would have gone unnoticed, except for the strangeness of their ends.

Carmela Valente hadn’t known the three women, yet she was compelled to travel across country to try to explain their deaths. What she found were the dark, missing pieces of herself…

This dark, contemporary mystery is a novel of self-discovery.

Retired and beginning a second career as an investigative writer, Carmela Valente is intrigued by a newspaper article detailing the apparent suicides of three aged sisters. Carmela travels to the remote coalmining region where the sisters lived to investigates their deaths.

Little does she know of the secrets the town harbors…

Carmela Valente
In Carmela’s past there had been a time of deep depression when she’d considered suicide, feeling there were no more answers. But her explosive upbringing also taught her how to prevail. She knew she was at a crossroads in her own mortality—but what could she possibly learn from a defunct mining town? Carmela wondered about the dead women, thinking, My goodness, they wouldn’t have had the same problems.

Fannie Gottschalt
Fannie, a run-down gal and owner of a general store and gas station, befriends Carmela. “Don’cha know that nobody likes to admit they got dirty linen? I guess because we think we should have our crap together, if you know what I mean. Nobody likes to think they’re not doing fine. They’re always a few folks with nothin’ better to do than point fingers. They get their jollies off by getting’ part of a story and runnin’ with it.  I just don’t like that one damn bit!”

A new acceptance takes root as Carmela realizes she is not all that different from the people of this coal town. Their struggles are hers. Their resentments and angers are hers. Their fears are hers. There are just different words to their stories. Carmela also realizes that her coming to that town changed those people too, helping them to see themselves anew through the eyes of an outsider—an outsider they come to trust and respect.

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