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Abstract
The Middle of Emptiness is a work of fiction following Mary Clarke Patrick, an eighteen-year-old high school graduate, as her family moves into a house in New Orleans’s French Quarter neighborhood before she begins her first year of college. In the summer between the end of high school and the start of her freshman year, Mary Clarke solves a centuries-old murder mystery that centers around her family’s new home and navigates the complicated, closed societies that surround the Greek sororities at Louisiana State University. As Mary Clarke reveals the secrets behind Augusta Lebrun’s murder, and discovers the embedded racism of sorority rush, a parallel emerges between the modern era and the past, and Mary Clarke realizes that she and Augusta have more in common than she could have ever known. This one hundred and four-page excerpt will be included in a fuller version of the novel at large and will be published to the mass market.