Passions

It is early 1930. This is the twenty-fifth Cyrus Skeen detective novel. Skeen meets the Kentucky moonshiner, Lemuel Skitter, who has been charged with murdering his daughter, Jewell, who eloped with the son of a rival moonshiner, Ezekiel McBride. Skitter's younger daughter, Charlene, hires Skeen to clear him of the murder charge. Skeen meets Skitter in jail, and gets his story of how he was knocked out and woke to find his eldest daughter dead. Lemuel's fingerprints are the only prints on the murder weapon. Skeen tackles one of the most difficult cases of his career, a case skewed by tribal and family loyalties that trump reason and logic.