Magic stuff. I forget how good a writer McCrumb is between books. She weaves history and culture and the real past together with a fictional present and comes up with unputdownable stories that become tales not just of a few characters but of the whole society of Appalachia.

This is the story of what happens when old man Randall Stargill is dying and his four sons and their partners gather at the family farm in the mountains to carry out his last wish, to build him the rosewood casket of the title. It’s much less of a mystery than the earlier books in the series have been but it’s the best imagined story of the series yet.