Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Two missing children, unscrupulous land grabbing (past and present), a shooting, a manhunt and visits from both an angel and a ghost are rendered with little suspense or mystery in McCrumb's fourth ballad novel, following the bestselling She Walks These Hills. As Randall Stargill lies in a coma in a Tennessee hospital, his four sons-a career soldier, a car salesman, a country singer and a naturalist-gather at the Appalachian family farm to prepare for his approaching death: while the men work on the handmade coffin daddy wants, their wives (one is a girlfriend) sew a quilt to line it. Old Nora Bonesteel, a neighbor and clairvoyant, brings something to tuck into Randall's coffin: a small box containing a child's skeleton. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood can't persuade Nora to tell whose bones they are; that trickle of frustration turns into a flood of bad luck when an oily real-estate developer enlists Arrowood's assistance to evict a neighboring family from their debt-encumbered farm (land that was originally swiped from the Cherokee, as McCrumb notes). The shooting of Sheriff Arrowood is a crime unrelated to the question of whose bones are in the box, though both issues are eventually resolved in the same mountain location. With few characters to care about and its low punch and puzzle quotients, this bland and cobbled tale is a miss for the accomplished McCrumb. 75,000 first printing; Mystery Guild and Literary Guild selections. (May)
Library Journal
McCrumb's mysteries (e.g., She Walks These Hills, S. & S., 1994) manage to please both fans of nongenre and genre fiction. Now, a family faces eviction from a cherished mountain farm.
Kirkus Reviews
Quite a homecoming for stricken Tennessee patriarch Randall Stargill's four sons: Their first family reunion in years includes at least one dead member, a child whose bones are duly presented to the family by elderly seer Nora Bonesteel. Nora quietly declines to identify the child or illuminate the mystery, but McCrumb is more obliging, dropping frequent hints about a ghostly girl who wanders the nearby woods, unable to take her final leave of the land. Just as this specter looks back to intrepid Cherokee fighter Nancy Ward and forward to a pair of present-day girls who'll retrace her steps, the Stargill boys (hardheaded car dealer Robert Lee, Army officer Garrett, country singer Charles Martin, and jack-of-all-natures Clayt) and their neighbors, J.Z. Stallard and his daughter Dovey—threatened, all of them, with losing their homes to a rapacious developer—will reenact the agon of Daniel Boone, the pioneer who opened the land to the very settlers who took it from him. (For readers who want even more deceased characters, there's the Stargills' late brother Dwayne, and Rudy, the angel confidante of Robert Lee's wife.) The properties' fate will be settled by a long-portended, but utterly unexpected, act of violence. The real mystery, though, is how McCrumb can make the Stargills' ties to the land they hardly know so heartbreaking.
Not quite the equal of She Walks These Hills (1994)—after all, what is?—but still grave, poignant, and altogether magical.
San Diego Union-Tribune
With this elopuent, lyrical, and, richly textured novel, McCrumb provides fresh evidence that there is no one quite like her among present-day writers. No one better either.”
Booklist
[McCrumb’s] fascination with the history of the region add[s] depth and charm to a story that’s warm without being sentimental. A bestseller in the making!”
Houston Chronicle
A tale artfully crafted, a novel written as folk art. With fluid writing and sensitive telling, McCrumb presents her Appalachian series as perfectly as dogwood in the spring.”
