It’s 1919 in the historical mystery by Frederick Ramsay set in the Buffalo Mounatin community of rural Virginia. Folks scratch out a living working the played-out soil on farmsteads, make moonshine, or maybe are lucky enough to grab one of the dwindling timber jobs. They believe in the Bible and taking care of their own with no interference from outsiders. They also believe in revenge and if a family member, no matter how distant, is done wrong, then it is up to his relatives to settle the score with the folks from the other side. In Buffalo Mountain there are two clans, the McAddo’s who live on one side of the mountain and the Lebruns’s who live on the other. No love is lost between them.

When Jesse Sutherlin came back to the mountain after a year in the trenches of the Western Front everything is just the way it was when he left. Things haven’t changed much since the Civil War but World War I changed him. The Army taught him to read better, drive a truck, and become an efficient killer. He met men from all over the country whose names he could not even pronounce, exchanged words with the German boys that old men said were his enemy, and seen Paris. He knew with a clarity as pure as the stream by his mother’s cabin that the mountain ways were not enough and that folks had to move with the times or they would be left behind.

So when his cousin Solomon had the back of his head blown away and the McAddo’s were ready to find a Lebrun and string him up, Jesse had to stop it. He had seen too much of killing and without proof about who had murdered the poor shell-shocked veteran, Jesse wasn’t about to let a new blood feud flare up and more blood spill down the mountain from both sides.

On his quest for the truth he finds himself the chief suspect in the murder of a Lebrun. No one really blames him because he did right by his cousin Solomon and if he hangs for it, well he upheld the family honor. Jesse is having none of this. He has no hankering to be shot from behind, killed in a knife fight, or swing from a tree. He didn’t survive the war jut to die on his mountain.

Jesse is a wonderful protagonist and the characters on the mountain are interesting people. From his stoic mother who has had too many losses in her family to the girl he comes to love from the opposing clan, the reader meets a tight, finely drawn community. This appears to be the start of a new series by Ramsay and it is very welcome. I look forward to reading more about the mountain and its folks.