[7] The book is based on the true story of the 1944 murder of two girls in South Carolina, for which the 14-year-old African-American boy George Stinney was later charged and executed on the electric chair, becoming the youngest child ever killed through capital punishment in the United States.
"[8] The novel was turned into the 1991 made-for-TV movie which aired on NBC Carolina Skeletons (alternative title: The End of Silence), directed by John Erman and starring Louis Gossett Jr.
The movie made some changes to the book's plot, e.g., turning Gossett's character, who returns to his hometown to find out the truth about the crime, into the brother instead of the nephew of the executed boy.
She compared the novel to Carolina Skeletons in the way Stout "expertly works the genre format on more than one level," reaching "into the psychology of grown-up children tortured by unresolved love-hate relationships" and developing the story into a thriller which is "even more haunting as a fathers-and-sons drama."
Moreover, finds Stasio, the story can also be read as a "regional novel" about the fictional upstate New York town of Bessemer with its wealthy steel-and-coal past, which has now become "a symbol of stagnation for those who must decide whether to stay or leave.
Stasio also highlighted that the story offered again more than "only" a mystery plot: "Less showy, but just as sturdy, are [Stout's] sensitive observations on the absent fathers, lost children and forsaken values that go with the territory of bleak towns like Long Creek.
Directed by the TV movie and series director John Power, the cast included Henry Winkler, Roma Downey, and Dale Midkiff.
[12] A few years later, Stout turned to writing non-fiction books and published Night of the Devil: The Untold Story of Thomas Trantino and the Angel Lounge Killings (2003) about the murder of two policemen in New Jersey.
[14] New York Times critic Charles Salzberg praised the book for not "taking sides or moralizing about the death penalty," but instead providing an "evenhanded, well-researched account of the legal machinations that kept Trantino a prisoner, as well as a fair and sympathetic portrait of the families of the victims, who still suffer the effects of that night at the [crime scene].