Larger	She Walks These Hills Author: Sharyn McCrumb
	Book Information Publisher: Signet Book Book Type: Mass Market Paperback Rating: 113 ISBN-13: 9780451184726 - ISBN-10: 0451184726 Publication Date: 10/1/1995 Pages: 447 Book Reviews

Annotation
The ghost of a murdered pioneer woman wanders the Appalachian hills, searching for a way home. But others, including a city-bred scholar and an escaped killer, also roam these hills, each undertaking a very personal journey. When their paths cross, a long-hidden mystery is revealed, and with it a secret that will rock the Appalachians to their very core.

From the Publisher
Historian Jeremy Cobb is backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, attempting to retrace the tragic journey of eighteen-year-old Katie Wyleredit, who was captured by the Shawnee after the massacre of her pioneer family in Mitchell County, North Carolina. In late summer, Katie escaped from a Shawnee village on the banks of the Ohio, and followed the rivers through the wilderness to find her way home -- a brave journey that ended in sorrow. Jeremy, a city-bred graduate student with no trail experience, is determined to complete his scholarly quest, unaware that his journey will be both a trial of hardships and a mystical experience. He does not know that the spirit of Katie Wyler is still seen wandering the hills, trying to get home. Mountain wise woman Nora Bonesteel sees her every autumn "when the air is crisp and the light is slanted and the birds are still." Hiram Sorley, known as Harm, is also at large in the Appalachian wilderness. Sorely, who has escaped from the Northeast Correctional Center in Mountain City, Tennessee, is the focus of a widespread manhunt involving most of the area's law enforcement officers. There's just one problem: nobody wants him caught. Harm has become a folk hero. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood feels sorry for Harm, imprisoned for life for killing a hated local bureaucrat. There is even some doubt about Harm's guilt. Besides, the elderly convict has Korsakoff's syndrome, a disease that robs its sufferers of their recent memories. To Harm, it is always 1967. Harm doesn't even remember the crime. For Martha Ayers, who wants the job of deputy, catching Harm Sorely would be the best way to prove her fitness for the position. Harm, an Appalachian Don Quixote on the edge of reality, meets both Jeremy and the still-wandering Katie Wyler on his journey back to a home that isn't there anymore. He is the "last moonshiner," holding the dream of an unspoiled wilderness in the fragile web of his delusions. When he goes, it will be lost forever.


From The Critics:

Publishers Weekly
In 1779, Katie Wyler, 18, was captured by the Shawnee in North Carolina. The story of her escape and arduous journey home through hundreds of miles of Appalachian wilderness is the topic of ethno-historian Jeremy Cobb's thesis--and the thread which runs through the third of McCrumb's ballad novels (after The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter). As Cobb begins to retrace Katie's return journey, 63-year-old convicted murderer Hiram (Harm) Sorley escapes from a nearby prison. Suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome, he has no recent memory: old Harm is permanently stuck in the past. Hamelin, Tenn., police dispatcher Martha Ayers uses the opportunity to convince the sheriff to assign her as a deputy. One of her first duties is to calm a young mother who, angry at her inattentive husband, is threatening her baby with a butcher knife. Ayers and the sheriff must also warn Harm's ex-wife Rita that he has escaped. Acting as a kind of narrative conscience is a local deejay, a "carpetbagger from Connecticut,'' who sees Harm as a folk hero from another era. Deftly building suspense, McCrumb weaves these colorful elements into her satisfying conclusion as she continues to reward her readers' high expectations.
--Mystery Guild selection; author tour. (Oct.)

BookList
The hills along the border where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina meet are full of walkers in Edgar-winner McCrumb's third Ballad-series story, but just miles from the Appalachian Trail, the wanderers meet each other only rarely. First among them is Katie Wyler, a teenage North Carolina settler kidnapped by Shawnees in 1779; escaping near the Ohio River, Katie plunged back through the wilderness, only to die the day she returned to her neighbors' home. Katie's ghost shares these hills with other troubled souls: a 63-year-old escaped convict, his memory befuddled by Korsakoff's syndrome; the convict's ex-wife and daughter; an isolated, frightened young mountain girl with a brutal husband and a crying baby; East Coast transplants Hank "the Yank" Kretzer, who checks out the convict's 25-year-old crime for his radio talk show (think of Chris on TV's "Northern Exposure"), and history graduate student Jeremy Cobb, obsessed with his dissertation topic (Katie Wyler), intent on following her centuries-old trail through the hills; and Martha Ayers, striving to move up from dispatcher to deputy on Sheriff Spencer Arrowood's staff while coping with Deputy Joe LeDonne's personal betrayal. As in her other Ballad novels, "If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O" (1990) and "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" (1992), McCrumb celebrates her home country, probes the multilayered puzzles of past and present, and meditates on human suffering and the survival instinct with sensitivity and compassion.