Investigative journalist Debra Ann Wynn has built her career on a simple rule: follow the facts, no matter how uncomfortable they make powerful people. That rule has taken her into corruption cases most reporters won’t touch. But when a call from rural Arkansas draws her into a long-buried family tragedy, Debra Ann finds herself facing a system where truth itself has become contraband.
Years earlier, a teenage girl was brutally assaulted in Narcissus County, a place ruled less by law than by personality and fear. The official response—overseen by County Judge Donny Trance and enforced by Sheriff Jade DeRump—was swift, final, and quietly incomplete. The family never believed the story they were given, and the damage left behind never truly healed.
Now, during the Christmas season of 2024, a second young woman is found murdered outside Nero’s Fiddle, near landmarks locals whisper about rather than visit—places like Mount Enabler and Hayseed Hollow. The crime forces the past back into the open, exposing a web of power that stretches from roadside diners to pulpits, from used-car lots to unofficial detention centers masquerading as civic institutions.
As Debra Ann returns to the county, she encounters a familiar cast of small-town power brokers: Ellen “Musky” Mellons, whose charm masks sharp instincts for survival; Joel Boasteen, a man who always seems to land on his feet; and Stephen Miller, whose influence operates best in shadows. Around them is a population trained to look away, taught that silence is safer than integrity.
Working alongside her husband and a handful of uneasy allies, Debra Ann follows the evidence across county lines—to Port Lybral County, where the rules are different and resistance is possible. What emerges is not merely a criminal investigation, but a portrait of how corruption sustains itself: through intimidation, selective enforcement, ritualized outrage, and the careful rewriting of reality.
Nero’s Fiddle continues the Debra Ann Wynn series tradition of grounded, fact-driven crime fiction with a sharp satirical edge. It is a darkly comic, deeply unsettling examination of how power functions when accountability disappears—and how familiar names, repeated often enough, can come to feel inevitable.
At its heart, the novel asks a question that reaches far beyond Narcissus County: "What happens when an entire system depends on people believing that nothing can ever change?"