Hurry Sundown Volume One Author:K. B. Gilden Progress had been long coming to Arcady, but by War's end--with the near-completion of Sunset, a mammoth mechanized farming operation--the little George town wasn't too many steps away from full industrialization. Only two things block Henry Warren from fulfilling his task of uniting the entire Arcady valley: Rad McDowell's far... more »m, bordering on the river, and Reeve Scott's acreage, adjacent to Rad's and stretching across the valley to the through road.
Together the pitiful little dirt farms of these two crackers-returned-from-the-War cut Sunset in two...and threatened to split asunder the wound that eighty years of reconstruction were just beginning to heal.
As the rival forces of tradition and progress make a battlefield of the valley, several interlocking narratives unfold: a member of the archaic Arcady aristocracy attempts to dispossess the family of the woman who had nursed her through childhood and taught her the meaning of good; a powerful industrialist tries to recapture the thrills of his penniless youth; an idealistic young minister works to join his opposing parishes in a spirit of genuine brotherhood, only to meet vicious resistance from both camps, a judge whose activities on the edge of the law have made him wealthy seek the political plum that has eluded him for twenty years; two physicians--one spineless and guilt ridden, the other unscrupulous and unfeeling--bid for recognition in quite different ways; and the social structure of the whole community pulses and surges as its members try to make their way upward.« less