The story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there - a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters - he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of Bitter Milk, a young boy named Luther who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet...

An investigation of the discovery of a woman's body, mummified after 30 years in a Tennessee cave, brings forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton of the Body Farm into conflict with inhabitants of a remote mountain community. The county's uncooperative sheriff and incompetent deputy threaten to derail the investigation, as do Brockton's personal demons-- lingering guilt over the death of his wife and the fury of a medical examiner whom Brockton opposes...

Tells the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy living in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed John's father.

"In the late 1800s, an aristocratic Tennessee family's lives are still touched by the aftermath of the Civil War."--Novelist.