BURIED LAND

The buried land is a valley along the Tennessee River, where the TVA has made possible a ""brand new world"", and submerged- under the water- is the body of Cora Kinkaid, who died after an abortion. But Cora's ""disappearance"" has not been forgotten; now, eight years later, her brother Fowler Kinkaid is still searching for her killer; Jesse Hood, one of the two young men responsible, nervously waits and watches; and Percy Youngblood, the other, returns here to practise law and to exorcise his guilt. Withdrawn and indecisive, Percy is increasingly isolated and immobilized by his guilt and fear; Kinkaid kills savagely- and unexpectedly- and Percy compounds the crime from which there will be no further escape... Madison Jones' best and strongest book of three, the accelerating violence gives it its surface momentum- but the book may well be best remembered for its Tennessee hill country background, the lives weathered and worn by the harsh existence there, the primal patterns which now face dislocation and the uneasy contrasts of old and new. This gives the book its real character.