Country Dark

Tucker is a young veteran who returns from the Korean War to the backwoods hills of eastern Kentucky and goes to work for a bootlegger, hauling shine through a world of laborers and shine-runners whose social codes are every bit as nuanced as the British aristocracy. He falls in love, marries young, and starts a family, building a fragile good life out of almost nothing. When that family is threatened, Tucker is pushed into violence that changes the course of all their lives. Offutt tracks the story from the early 1950s to 1970, writing a fierce noir-inflected portrait of a good man cornered by poverty and circumstance.