The Outlier

About the Book

Imagine this…Wilton, a small town in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Roland Briggs, a brilliant but burned out ex-homicide detective from the south trying to escape the horror of his wife’s suicide and his subsequent nervous breakdown, takes the job of chief of police. For two years, it’s just as he’d hoped, quiet and unchallenging. But then, it the fall of 1972, the town is rocked by the grisly murders of two elderly women. A man is caught and convicted. The evidence against him is overwhelming. Everyone is satisfied that the murderer is behind bars. Everyone except Briggs. Armed with only a few inconsistencies and his belief that the convicted man was framed, Briggs begins his search to find the motive for these senseless and seemingly random acts of violence. Slowly, he begins to realize that the reason for these crimes is buried in the old and abandoned, Wilton School for the Feeble-Minded, up on the hill on the outskirts of town.

About the Author

RJ Stanton is a supervisor for the United States Postal Service. He has a degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He and his wife, Meredith, and their dog, Spenser, live in Holyoke, Massachusetts. This is the first of many novels for him.