A Knight of the Cumberland

The Cumberland Mountains in October: a world of ridge runners, moonshiners, and men who settle love disputes with pistols. When a narrator and his little sister take a journey through these hills, they encounter "the Blight" - a young woman whose name is an ironic gift from her father, since nothing about her suggests ruin. She is enchanting, captivating, dangerous. Two impetuous Southern gentlemen arrive and fall under her spell, but the mountaineers who truly love her will not stand for outsiders. The novel crackles with romantic tension and the ever present threat of violence, for in these hills courtship and gunplay go hand in hand. Fox writes with a romantic's eye about a world both beautiful and brutal, where a woman's charm can spark feuds and outsiders learn too late that mountain men kill for what they love. A story of desire and honor in the forgotten corners of Appalachia.