Adele Dawson, finally back with her West Virginia birth family, is driven to learn why her father died so young and why her mother remarried despicable August Beck, a con artist, then gave birth to eight of his children. When her half-sisters also come to live with her, they get wise to a secret museum of treasures in Adele’s once-lavish stone mansion.
Together, they discover secrets inside a locked vault about her mother’s coerced life in corruption, greed, and extortion, secrets that now threaten to extinguish the entire family.
Her paternal grandmother’s final wish is that Adele rebuild the family’s coal mine, nearly bankrupt from the Depression, and restore the river stone mansion to its original beauty. The more involved she becomes in the mining business, the more she discovers her mother’s enemies have concealed themselves within the family business.
On the verge of gaining trust from superstitious coal miners, her saboteur stepfather creates mine blasts that injure workers, forcing the reconstruction to miss critical deadlines. Set in a pre-World War II coal mining town. Impeccably researched.
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