A lonely boy in a prairie town befriends a local outsider in 1947. For young Leonard, it’s an escape from school, bullies and his father. When he witnesses Bill commit a murder, his shock is absolute. Fifteen years later, they are reunited at the Weyburn Mental Institution – Leonard as staff, Bill as inmate – and Leonard becomes fixated on discovering the truth of what happened on that long-ago day.

STARFest facts

Helen Humphreys is an acclaimed and award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Her fiction includes Machine Without Horses, The Evening Chorus, Coventry and Afterimage and her nonfiction includes The Ghost Orchard and The Frozen Thames, as well as the memoir Nocturne. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Helen Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Rabbit Foot Bill is her 19th book. Based on a true story, this page-turning novel from a master stylist examines the frailty and resilience of the human mind.

Jacqueline Baker’s short story collection, A Hard Witching, was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Alberta Book Award for short fiction. Her novels are The Horseman’s Graves, and The Broken Hours, a ghost story about the final days of H.P. Lovecraft’s life. She teaches creative writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton.