The City of Fire

A small Pennsylvania town, a bootlegging ring working out of an abandoned farm, a minister's daughter who sees too much, and a young man home from the war. Hill was widowed at thirty-four with two daughters and wrote to keep them, producing more than a hundred books; this 1922 novel is her Prohibition thriller, and the piety is inseparable from the plot rather than pasted on top of it. Sixty plates of fields, harvests and churchyards by painters from Corot to Munch run alongside the text, matching the novel's farmland and Sunday piety with their own seasons of work and worship.