The Maids Version

Daniel Woodrell published The Maid's Version in 2013. It is a short novel set in West Table, Missouri, and it is told at a distance of years, as a woman's account of something that happened when she was young.

Alma DeGeer Dunahew is the mother of three boys and works as a maid for a prominent family in the town. Her husband is mostly absent, and in 1929 her younger sister, who was scandalous and much loved, was among the forty-two people killed in an explosion at the local dance hall.

Nobody agrees about who was to blame. The suspicion falls in turn on gangsters from St. Louis, on gypsies with a grudge, on a preacher who had been denouncing the morals of the waltzing couples, and on the possibility that it was a terrible accident after all. Alma believes she knows the answer, and that it comes out of a love affair that was dangerous to more than the people involved. Her determination to see justice done turns her into an outsider in the town and opens a rift with her own son that lasts for years; the book reaches the reader through the story she tells her grandson.