Evening Street: A Bell Elkins Novella

By day, she's a tough-minded prosecutor in Raythune County, West Virginia, a region scarred by poverty and prescription drug abuse. By night, Bell Elkins takes on a softer role. She volunteers at an auxiliary intensive care unit where nurses deal with the youngest and most vulnerable victims of drug abuse: the children born to mothers addicted to painkillers.

The place is known as Evening Street, and it is here Bell comes whenever she can spare the time. She rocks ailing infants to sleep, an...