Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel

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To our loyal and encouraging readers, who’ve made these last ten years — and these first ten books — such a pleasure

Some wounds heal quickly, the scars vanishing, or at least fading to thin white lines over the years. Some assaults are too grave, though; some things can never be set right, never be made whole or healthy again, no matter how many seasons pass.

In this regard, wounded mountains are like wounded beings. Cut them deeply — slice off their tops or carve open their flanks — and the disfigurement is beyond healing.

So it was with Frozen Head Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. In the early 1960s, Frozen Head’s northern slope — thickly forested with hardwoods and hemlocks — was blasted and bulldozed away by wildcat strip miners to expose a thick vein of soft, sulfurous coal. Geologists called it the Big Mary vein, and for three years, Big Mary was illegally carved up, carted away, and fed into the insatiable maw of Bull Run Steam Plant, forty mountainous miles south. Then Big Mary’s vein ran dry, and the miners and their machines — their dredges and draglines and stubby, hulking haul trucks — departed as abruptly as they’d appeared.

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