Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge

Scott Burton arrives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to take up a posting as a forester, expecting to catalogue timber and navigate terrain. What he finds is a landscape where the mountains themselves seem to hold old grudges, and the feud between the Morgan and Wait families has calcified into something beyond reason. Generations of blood and betrayal have made the valley a place where neutrality is impossible and choosing sides means risking everything. As Burton attempts to do his job, managing the forest resources, navigating between commercial interests and preservation, he discovers that the feud touches every aspect of mountain life: who owns the timber rights, who courts whom in secret, who can walk which roads without fear. The professional distance he was told to maintain begins to crumble as he is drawn into the lives of both families, forced to reckon with the human cost of a conflict that has outlasted anyone's memory of how it began. Cheyney writes with the eye of a regionalist and the instincts of a dramatist, capturing early 20th-century Appalachian life in all its complexity, its fierce independence, its tragic inheritances, its strange beauty. This is a novel about what happens when an outsider tries to stay above the fray in a place where the fray is the only game in town.