"A Place Called Wiregrass and Slow Way Home were both showered with critical acclaim. His 2004 novella Live Like You Were Dying was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award...Look for Man in the Blue Moon to eclipse them all. (Florida Times Union)

Morris (Slow Way Home) has crafted a magical and mesmerizing page-turner rooted in hardscrabble Florida during WWI, based in part on a true family story. Ella Wallace is scrambling to keep her three sons and herself from the poorhouse after her opium-addicted husband vanishes. She owns a piece of land that reptilian banker Clive Gillespie, a spurned former suitor, would love to have, and he has leverage in the form of a mortgage on the property. But Ella finds an unexpected ally in her husband’s cousin Lanier Stillis, who arrives in unorthodox fashion and has some unusual talents, and the two collaborate until Lanier’s past catches up with him in a Shakespearean blaze of climactic action. Morris’s narrative is subtle and supple, with overtones of the wry Southernisms of Flannery O’Connor, the rural Florida backdrop of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and a good helping of powerful and mysterious faith. Book clubs should devour this rich, carefully observed mix of characters, time, and place; Morris deserves to break out of the regional-writer box. - Publishers Weekly

The reader may hear echoes of Harper Lee . . . or of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern grotesques . . . or even of Huck Finn. . . . But Morris has his own voice and his own story, and he tells it with uncommon skill and compassion.-Washington Post

While World War I rages through Europe, Ella begins her own battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the hands of an unscrupulous banker. A mysterious man who arrives at Ella s door in an unconventional way convinces her he can help, and a tenuous trust begins.But when the battle for Ella s land intensifies, the town s suspicion of her visitor surges, and it s soon apparent he is as haunted by his past as Ella is terrified for her future. As the two realities collide, hypocrisy and murder shake the coastal town of Apalachicola, jeopardizing everything Ella has fought so desperately to save.

In a riveting portrait of turn-of-the-century Florida, acclaimed author Michael Morris weaves an unforgettable drama of love and loyalty, betrayal and redemption.