Book excerpt: In Clinch River Justice, a boy matures into manhood, falls in love, and begins to find his way in life. As an inexperienced but idealistic deputy sheriff, this young man, Charley Scott, faces a rash of deaths in a normally idyllic, peaceful Appalachian community in the early 1940s. These deaths of neighbors and a beloved family member result when greed, passion, jealousy, hopelessness, or utter disdain for the life or welfare of another human overcomes some residents’ sense of fi delity and of right and wrong. In the young deputy’s endeavors to apprehend killers and in his quest for justice, he learns how difficult that simple concept is to achieve.