Noura Jost

A long time ago... in the summer of 1981, a tragedy of epic proportions (a broken plastic bat) sends five friends on an epic adventure to the mall. All they have to do is follow The Stream and back.

In January of 1969, seventeen-year-old Hala emigrates with her family from Palestine to Michigan and attends a public high school with a dress code wherein girls cannot wear pants. With her limited grasp of the English language, Hala repeatedly disobeys the rules, wearing pants day after day. Ultimately she unknowingly, or knowingly, starts a revolution in her new school.

What happens when an eyewitness to a murder comes forward to the police forty years later? What happens when the detective assigned to the case finds out that it is her mother who has made that call? Laura Posey is that detective and Ava Posey Bedingfield is the woman who can no longer live without her two daughters knowing the truth. The Maltese Murder Mystery is the story of love and deceit, of envy and lust, of hatred, addiction and murder. The Maltese Murder Mystery tells the compelling story of human frailties and the lengths to which people will go both to conceal and, perhaps even more harmful, to hide from the truth.

In crisis, Teresa drags her long lost friend Elena out to the desert of Texas. Against the backdrop of anti-immigrant sentiment and domestic abuse, the two friends navigate crime and secrecy to find their way back to each other.