Half the Terrible Things is an intimate and sometimes violent novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic. Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp “Whipping Boss.” His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country. Eighty years later, his girlfriend, Edna, nearing her end in a nursing home in Devils Lake, ND, asks her granddaughter, Nicole, to find his grave. Nicole, a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. The Tabert case resulted in prison reform in Florida after North Dakotans intervened following Tabert’s death.
