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Author Ken Jaworowski had a good reason for returning to the milieu of small-town crime for his latest novel, 2025’s “What About the Bodies.”
He had so much more to say.
“I stuck with the rural setting because after I finished ‘Small Town Sins,’ I realized I had plot notes and sketches for other characters, and decided that I wasn’t done with Locksburg, and that Locksburg wasn’t done with me,” Jaworowski said in an interview.
So much more to say, in fact, that “What About the Bodies” also won’t be readers’ last dive into Locksburg, Pennsylvania, the struggling, fictional Rust Belt town that serves as setting for Jaworowski’s books.
Jaworowski, an editor at The New York Times, grew up in Philadelphia and knows Pennsylvania well, including the small towns that thrived during years of steel production, coal mining, and related industry. Like some of those towns, Locksburg is presented as a hollowed-out shell of its former self, much of the remaining populace more desperate to survive with what’s left or to get out. Desperation drives people in sometimes disastrous directions, and crime stories leverage locales like Locksburg to tap into that desperation.
Released in 2023, “Small Town Sins” followed three very different residents of Locksburg and so does Jaworowski’s latest. His protagonists are immediately relatable, even when they make bad decisions — sometimes very bad decisions.
In “What About the Bodies,” we follow Liz, a hard-luck musician looking to make a splash in the music business and settle her debt to a dangerous criminal; Carla, a single mother who risks everything to help cover up a death; and Reed, a young man on the autism spectrum struggling to deal with rejection and danger all around him.
They’re all fascinating characters, but I asked Jaworowski about Reed in particular, curious how he wrote such a wonderful and complex character. He said he didn’t use a “sensitivity reader,” an editor of sorts who would provide perspective, in this case on the experience of autistic people, to aid the writing of a novel.
Cover art for “What About the Bodies,” released 2025 (Credit: Atlantic Crime).
“I received notes from a sensitivity reader on ‘Small Town Sins,’ but not for ‘What About the Bodies.’ I have several close family members who are autistic, and they are beautiful people, and they helped me, I hope, get it right,” Jaworowski said.
As he did in “Small Town Sins,” Jaworowski weaves these separate but eventually intersecting stories of his three leads in “What About the Bodies.” The story plays out against a backdrop of a town that’s faded and begun to fail its residents young and old.
Liz could finally punch a ticket to Nashville and the music business, if she could just deal with those debts to a local gangster, as well as her father’s scheming girlfriend and her own duplicitous and shifty ex. Her possible salvation revolves around a valuable gift from her father.
Carla wants nothing more than to open her own restaurant, and she’s got plenty of help from her young adult son. But he needs rescuing from an awful decision of his own that requires hiding a body.
Again, Reed is my favorite of the three main characters. He is unfailingly honest and always comes through for people even as he tries to avoid those who would victimize him. Reed’s story sees him trying to fulfill a promise he made to his mother before she died.
The characters’ stories intersect but are self-contained, and I found myself eagerly anticipating what would happen next even as Jaworowski rotates the perspectives of his three main characters from chapter to chapter. A chapter about Liz is followed by one about Reed and then one about Carla, for example. Jaworowski told me why he was drawn to that approach.
“I change character perspectives for a simple reason: I get bored easily,” he told me. “And if I get bored, I fear the reader will get bored. There’s a great quote I read recently from the novelist Donna Tartt: ‘The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.’ Joyce Carol Oates puts it even shorter: ‘Don’t be boring.’”
Readers taken in by the stories of “Small Town Sins” and “What About the Bodies” can look forward to a return to Locksburg, Jaworowski said.
“I’ve got two more completed novels,” he said. “One is the final book set in Locksburg and follows three characters there who get caught up in some nasty business. And the other book is a new direction for me, at least in terms of setting. It’s a crime thriller set amid the Philadelphia illegal drug trade.”
Small Town Sins and What About the Bodies are available via your public library or from booksellers big and small.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Rural Rust Belt Towns Inspire Crime Thriller “What About the Bodies” appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
