From the author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart and set in the boom years of the West Virginia coalmining industry, this is an epic story of personal ambition, exile and return, and a grand heist.Keystone, West Virginia, 1910In the hot August rain the townspeople gather to witness the first public hanging in over a decade. At the gallows are none other than poker player, Abe Baach, and his lover, the madam of the town’s brothel, one Goldie Toothman.Abe split town seven years prior and has...
Over the last 150 years, the Public Analyst profession has hidden its light under a bushel, with the notable exception of Fredrick Accum, one of the first Public Analysts who published the names and addresses of food adulterers, this group of chemists has quietly protected the public from food fraud and adulteration. Using their forensic skills to find traces of poison and other deleterious materials in our food and guiding the Courts and legal profession through complex scientific evidence, it...
There’s little room in this world for a moral manMeet Early “Trenchmouth“ Taggart, a man born and orphaned in 1903, a man nicknamed for his lifelong oral affliction. His boyhood is shaped by the Widow Dorsett, a strong mountain woman who teaches him to hunt and survive the taunts of others. In the hills of southern West Virginia, a boy grows up fast. Trenchmouth sips moonshine, handles snakes, pleasures women, and masters the rifle – a skill that lands him in the middle of the West Virginia coal...
A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.1941. Orphan Loyal Ledford lives a very ordinary life in Huntington, West Virginia. By day a History major, by night a glass-blower at the Mann Glass factory where he courts the boss's daughter Rachel. Preferring to read rather than talk about the war raging in Europe, he focuses his mind upon work and study. However when Pearl Harbour is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets...
