The Oakdale Affair

The Oskaloosa Kid is seventeen years old and already a master of shadows. He slips into the Prim family home in Oakdale expecting a simple burglary. What he finds is Abigail Prim, a wealthy heiress trapped in a life of suffocating privilege, desperate for escape. Their worlds collide in a storm of murder, mistaken identity, and violent confrontation with a roving band of criminals who mistake the Kid for a fellow thug. As bodies pile up and secrets unravel, the young burglar and the runaway heiress must navigate a treacherous landscape where the lines between victim and villain blur completely. Burroughs, writing in 1918, delivers a propulsive tale that crackles with tension, using the collision between the underbelly of American life and its gilded upper crust to ask uncomfortable questions about class, identity, and what society actually rewards.