Inman, a young Confederate soldier, who is injured during the explosive 1864 battle of Petersburg, Virginia, is struggling to make his way home to Cold Mountain, NC, where his beloved Ada awaits him. In Inman's absence, Ada befriends Ruby, who helps her keep up her late father's farm. Meanwhile, in his travels, Inman encounters a menagerie of interesting and colorful characters.

"A village is destroyed. A vengeance is born. And one man blazes a trail to hell and back to pay the devils their due--in bullets and blood. They call him Preacher... JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE. It starts as a happy reunion between Preacher and his fellow trappers in a peaceful Indian village. But it ends swiftly in death and destruction when a rival tribe attacks the village, slaughters some of Preacher's Crow and mountain man friends,...

When the body of Joe Rose, a precious-metals assayer, turns up trampled behind her saloon, Inez Stannert is asked by the victim's widow to help settle his affairs, a job that leads Inez into a web of skewed assays, counterfeit money, blackmail, and murder.

THE GREATEST WESTERN WRITER OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Smoke Jensen never wanted to kill, but fate had other plans, and the Mountain Man has left plenty of blood, tears and fury in his wake. Angus MacDougal, the father of one of Smoke's victims, wants revenge. Riding up to Big Rock, Colorado, MacDougal has decided that killing Smoke won't be enough. He intends to bring him back to Pueblo and hang him before a crowd. It's a bloodthirsty plan that...

Randall Stargill's imminent death stirs up the living and the dead, with a real estate developer poised to snap up the Stargill's Appalachian farm, Randall's four sons trying to deal with each other and the demands left by their dying father, and an old sweetheart hoping to lay a long-held secret to rest.

In 1952, "bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood, a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted '40 Ford coupe ... In the mill town at the foot of the mountains--a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car...

"There are two kinds of traps in the Old West. One is the kind that Preacher and his buddy, Charlie, use to catch a mountain-load of fur pelts. The other is the kind that Charlie steps into--a trap set by a low-life gambler and his seductive partner in crime to swindle Charlie out of his fur money. Preacher hates to see a good friend get robbed. So he sets off after the grifters--on a riverboat bound for New Orleans. First , he infiltrates the criminal...

Twenty-five years ago David Petersen and his wife, Caroline, pulled up stakes, trading Laguna Beach, California for a snug handbuilt cabin in the wilderness. Today he knows that mountain land as intimately as anyone has ever known his family, his lover, or his own true self. He has become attuned to his environment, as this memoir reveals, that when a dead twig snaps, he knows what stepped on it, how much it weighed, and what its intentions were.

Skipping back and forth in time from the 18th to the late 20th century, and drawing on her own family history, McCrumb tells two stories in her appealing new novel, one heading toward, the other returning to, the Appalachians. In the present-day sections, 83-year-old John Walker is slowly dying in the eastern Tennessee town where he has lived most of his life, while his estranged daughter, Linda Walker better known as the country singer Lark McCourry...