Blue Ridge

the long version

"In Blue Ridge, Ray Tatum is the new deputy sheriff of Hogarth, Virginia, located in the middle of nowhere with "nothing too awful gaudy afoot" until the discovery of a nearly complete set of human bones on the Appalachian Trail. Ray's cousin Paul is an actuary summoned to New York to identify a fresher and rather less complete body: that of his son, sired in the free and ardent seventies, whom he scarely knew."--BOOK JACKET.