The Wild Olive: A Novel

Norrie Ford runs through the Adirondack wilderness with nothing but his innocence and desperate fear. Wrongfully sentenced by Judge Wayne, he has escaped custody into a landscape as unforgiving as the society that condemned him. When he stumbles upon a secluded clearing and the judge's own home, he faces an impossible choice: surrender to the man who destroyed his life, or accept help from an unexpected ally. What follows is a tense meditation on justice and mercy, where a fugitive finds refuge not in wilderness but in the conflicted heart of the woman who holds his fate. The Wild Olive is a tale of escape in every sense: from prison, from injustice, from the rigid moral certainties of a world that would rather punish the innocent than admit its own errors. King's novel pulses with early 20th-century anxieties about law, guilt, and the radical act of choosing compassion over convention.