Jesse Sutherlin Mysteries

It's 1928, Jesse Sutherlin now has his own family and has made a success at the sawmill below Virginia's Buffalo Mountain working for JG Edwards. The country's economy is booming. And then David Privette, the sheriff who succeeded Dalton P. Franklin with whom Jesse had a run-in or two in Copper Kettle, arrives with surprising news - the body of Jesse's father has just been discovered in the pit at Smith's West Oxford Street ice house operation. How could this be? In 1918, a man had brought the family the news that Sutherlin, Sr., had died of the Spanish flu while seeking work up in Norfolk, Virginia. Sheriff Privette doesn't take a deep interest in this cold crime, but Jesse is not letting it go. The body has been found with a money belt fat with fifty dollars, a small fortune. Twenty of the seventy dollars that Sutherlin Sr. was carrying is missing. So is his heirloom watch given to him for thirty years' service in the AM and O Railroad which is now the Norfolk and Western. It was gold and big as an onion. What happened to the money and to "the Onion"? Was all this the work of a thief? Who was the man who showed up at the Sutherlin's door? There's not much to work with. But that won't stop Jesse who investigates as the 1928 boom progresses relentlessly toward 1929.

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.