Reading with Las Comadres

About the book

Hell or High Water, A Novel
It's 2008 in New Orleans, and hundreds of registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation have never been found. The sex-offender story is assigned to Nola Céspedes, an ambitious young reporter at the Times-Picayune, who tries to balance her investigation with taking care of her aging mother, seeing her girlfriends, mentoring a teenager, and meeting a mysterious stranger named Bento.

As her research progresses, Nola is gradually drawn in to an underworld of violent predators--a world she struggles to keep separate from her middle-class professional life. Raised in poverty by a single mother in New Orleans' notorious Desire Projects, Nola has her own secrets to hide.

About the Author

Joy Castro
Castro was born in Miami in 1967 and adopted four days later by a Cuban-American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

She earned her B.A. at Trinity University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in literature at Texas A&M University. After graduate school, she worked for ten years at Wabash College, one of three remaining all-male private liberal arts colleges. In 2007, she joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is currently an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Ethnic Studies and serves as the associate director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies.

Castro is finishing a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and working on a second novel. She lives with her husband in Lincoln, Nebraska.