His "day in Court": 1895
In the hard country of the Great Smoky Mountains, a woman has made an unforgivable choice. Evelina Quimbey has married Absalom Kittredge, a man whose family has warred with her own for generations. Now she exists in the terrible space between two surnames, two sets of accusations, two bloodlines that have learned to hate each other across decades. Her father Joel and her brothers cannot forgive her; the memory of violence still raw from the last collision between these families. Yet the spring is coming, the snow is melting on the slopes, and something in the mountain air suggests that the worst conflicts may yet be ahead. Charles Egbert Craddock writes with the eye of someone who understands exactly how people survive in such isolated, proud places, where family honor is survival itself and love becomes a kind of treason. This is a novel about what happens when the heart chooses someone your blood has taught you to destroy.
