Luce lives as a semi-recluse looking after a falling-down lodge on the shore of a lake in the mountains of North Carolina - until her dead sister's mute kids are entrusted to her care by the state. Unknown to Luce or the authorities, having been found not guilty of the murder of their mother, their father Bud is looking for them - the only witnesses to what really happened the day their mother died.

The narration, told in the present tense, is at times tough and gritty, and at others has a touching simplicity of understated emotion, befitting the taciturn characters. The post-WWII decades in which the story is set could just as easily have been the 'tween wars depression years. Nothing seems to have moved on much back in the mountains, nor does it seem likely to.

Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, is an excellent story teller, for all his economy of narrative style. He pulls the reader into the claustrophobic group of characters and builds the tension towards a thriller of a climax.