News & Events

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Last Place Called Home has gained international recognition through a review by Mohan Rao in the October-December 2025 issue of Biblio, India’s leading literary magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

“Hartmann’s novel is set in the small mill town of Stanton in Massachusetts, reeling with job losses and families desperately trying to keep themselves together, even as an opioid epidemic consumes their young…This is a novel about vulnerability, about bewilderment, and about grief that haunts these families. It is also about the grace and generosity that holds a small community together in the face of larger forces, national and global. It is gripping, it is tense, it makes you want to weep…The writing is vivid, at times lyrical.” 

Here’s a link to the local community television recording of my author talk/reading at the Lee, MA public library on June 11, 2025. I’m very grateful to have been accompanied by Eric Reinhardt of the South County Recovery Center in Great Barrington.

Betsy is interviewed in this recent article by Adrienne Matei in the Guardian on the phenomenon of hypernormalization.

Last Place Called Home is a category finalist in the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Awards.

Read Betsy’s essay on CrimeReads: Drugs and Distance: Taking on the Opioid Crisis in Thriller Form

Last Place Called Home is a Political Thriller finalist in the 2024 American Fiction Awards.

Last Place Called Home is a Mystery/Suspense finalist in the 2024 International Book Awards.

Last Place Called Home featured in Hampshire College News.