No one's ever fallen out of love with Glorette Picard, with her black waterfall of hair and skin gold as a mothwing. Fine as wine and just my kind, they call her. Gilt, they call her. Still, when they drive by the alley where she works every night, they call her other things.

Now Glorette's body is found in that alley, folded up in a shopping cart. Before the dry creek swells and the orange groves blossom, Rio Seco, California, will bury the most beautiful woman who ever walked its streets. In Susan Straight's most gracefully told novel, the heart of the Inland Empire is broken wide open to reveal the loyalty, the dark history, and the love that runs in the veins of a hidden America. Between Heaven and Here is gripping in its compassion a portrait that "ought to be recognized as a national artistic treasure" (The Boston Globe).