A Good Girl: A Novel

Gracey Reiter confronts a painful past and an intimidating future with the approaching death of her father, Henry Mueller, the self-described last Mohican from the chaotic gene pool known as the Walsh-Mueller family. The present holds the answer, and the last opportunity for Gracey to understand her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s infidelity, and her siblings’ version of the truth.

Always present is Gracey’s past: the voices of her grandmother, Viola Mueller, and her great-great-grandmother, Irish immigrant Patricia Walsh Mueller. Patricia arrives in Texas in 1847 from the pestilence and starvation of Ireland. A Good Girl examines the numbing work of raising children and burying parents through six generations.