This carefully researched work of historical fiction is set in the rural Georgia foothills shortly after World War I--just as the new village of Helen was becoming a rough-and-ready sawmill town and power companies were building dams on the might Tallulah River to provide electricity for Atlanta. This was a time and place where scars from the recent war and the worldwide flu pandemic were still fresh and, all too often, visible.

This book presents a world as it surely existed then, where passions run deep, where good choices lead to romance and bad ones set the stage for a twist of...