The Mystery of Rita Peale

De: T.R. Connolly

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

When Rita Peale comes back into his life, Sam Nichols, a young newspaper reporter, is transformed and alarmed. It seems Rita knows certain events in Sam's early life that he does not recall happening, only to later remember they did occur.

Though their teenage love is long past, it is rekindled in the affection they always kept for each other. While Rita is recovering from long-Covid symptoms after heroic duty as an emergency room nurse, they meet again as Sam is completing an explosive story about the abject poverty thousands of former employees of Detroit's auto industry are living in.

Sam's reporting advances his career in New York, but it is to St. Joseph, Missouri that he is drawn. Rita lives there; his grandfather, Frank, who raised him lives there; his mentor, Arthur Warren, the owner/editor of the St. Joseph Express lives there and wants Sam to take over the paper. And pieces of his life are there - pieces of a life he does not remember, pieces of a life Rita does remember, but are a mystery to her. Together, Rita and Sam move forward in a larger love, partially haunted by the past, but determined to know more about who they were then, even before they knew each other.

Scenes from the novel:
- Rita dances one night on top of a levee in Helena, Arkansas to the music of the Blind Boys of Alabama
- A grandfather raises his grandson
- Choosing a career between the bits and bytes of programming or the words and phrases of writing
- The tall grass prairie of Kansas - 6 million acres remain, 360 degrees across the horizon
- A Black family fights its way through a 9 year descent into poverty and nearly survives
- A young man recalls his teen years and the girl who taught him about fun, and life and other stuff
- An explosive front page story in the New York Times
- A young couple growing together discover a past they did not know they had
- Slum lords light up their houses for insurance money