Tartt, Donna — The Little Friend

New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. First Edition. Hardcover. Size: Large 8vo 9" - 10. Sturdy, attractive, tightly bound in Imperial octavo hardcover format, generally clean, minimal rubbing to extremities. Bound in black cloth over boards, sharp and distinct gilt lettering to spine. Bright and shiny dust jacket, illustrated, little worn. From the publisher's blurb, "The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother's Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents' yard. Twelve years later Robin's murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin's sister Harrieta's unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town's rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family's history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and "bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens" (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent." 555 pp.Member, I.O.B.A., C.B.A., and adherent to the highest ethical standards. . . . Fine/Near Fine,