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Poison Pen Press
February 2017
On Sale: February 7, 2017
Featuring: Serena Barker; Jesse Sutherlin
218 pages
ISBN: 1464207828
EAN: 9781464207822
Kindle: B01MTVTO9U
Hardcover / e-Book
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Mystery Historical
It's 1920. Jesse Sutherlin has returned to Buffalo Mountain
a war hero, having after survived the trenches of World War
I. Not only did he fight the enemy, reaching the rank of
officer, he went a few rounds with some of his fellow
soldier who viewed him as a hillbilly. Jesse is glad to be home. But his view of the world and of
himself has changed. What next? He can't shake his training
as an officer to follow the old lifestyle. He applies for a
job at the local sawmill where his new boss quickly makes
him foreman for a decent wage. And he meets the independent
Serena Barker. His cousin and fellow soldier, Solomon McAdoo, was less
fortunate in his war service. He's suffering from shell
shock. One day, up on the mountain while tending to a family
moonshine still owned by Big Tom McAdoo, he's shot in the
back. When Jesse hears this, he knows violence is going to
boil up. The west side of the mountain is McAdoo territory,
while the east side belongs to the Lebruns. The dispute
ignited by Solomon's murder will be like the feud between
the West Virginia Hatfields and McCoys, with no winners,
only more dead men. The mountain is a hard place, where
shooting someone over a disagreement is just part of life.
Jesse decides to head off the violence by investigating the
crime. But he's hampered by his bellicose Sutherlin family who want
retribution. Jesse is also held back by Serena, a Lebrun
relative, who urges him to get away before he gets himself
killed, and by a bigoted local sheriff who soon arrests him
on the testimony of an eyewitness to Solomon's death. Jesse
encounters a lawyer in Floyd, the county seat, who is hired
to defend him when he's arrested, romances the girl from the
enemy camp, and tries to stay alive while preventing more,
perhaps wholesale, deaths. Big Tom gives him a deadline:
four days. Looming over all this drama is the specter of the influenza
epidemic that killed more people worldwide than died in the
trenches, as well as the grinding kind of poverty that has
become a way of life for folks on the played-out farmland of
this corner of Appalachia.
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