Grundy County Series
Devil's Notch
Grundy County, Tennessee. 1937.
The Grundy County Herald would prefer Quinn MacLeod stick to community events and polite copy. Quinn has other ideas.
Her investigation into Pontipee's coal operations has already turned up records that don't add up, angry miners who are done being silent, and a consulting engineer named Sam Covington who is being systematically targeted by the same men she's watching. There's something buried in these mountains far more dangerous than labor trouble.
The problem is getting close enough to find it. The meetings where the real conversations happen are closed to women. So Quinn borrows a tie and the name Avery Stevens — and her long-suffering editor cousin prays nobody notices.
Somebody notices.
The deeper she pushes into Pontipee's operations, the clearer it becomes that a criminal enterprise is running beneath the surface of these mines — protected by men with money, muscle, and every reason to keep Grundy County quiet.
They will kill to keep it buried.
Quinn MacLeod is going to write it anyway.
Devil's Notch is Southern Appalachian noir about company-town power, buried crime, and a woman who risks everything to write a story she can't sign her name to.
Some truths are buried for a reason. Others are buried by men.
Hangdog Hill
Grundy County, Tennessee. 1946.
In Beckin's Gap, the law was just a rumor. Dr. Lancaster intended to change that.
He lasted only a few weeks as mayor before someone had him killed.
His daughter Cole is twenty-three, spoiled rotten, and constitutionally incapable of being told what to do. She is also the last person the men behind her father's murder expected to be a problem.
They underestimated her significantly.
The deeper Cole pushes into what her father uncovered — a local machine built on fear, disappearances, and the kind of violence that survives by teaching people to stay quiet — the more dangerous she becomes. When the men responsible decide she is more useful as bait than as a witness, the trap closes around her.
Police Chief Gavan Lafitte — Cajun, Medal of Honor Marine, and dangerous by temperament — promised Cole's father he would protect her. What he did not anticipate was that protecting Cole Lancaster and controlling Cole Lancaster were two entirely different problems.
Hangdog Hill is Southern Appalachian noir about buried violence, civic corruption, and a reckless young woman who makes an expensive nuisance of herself in the direction of the truth.
In Beckin's Gap, silence was never peace. It was control.
