Bloody Breathitt Bastards
Power, Blood, and the Men Who Ruled Eastern Kentucky
In the mountains of eastern Kentucky, the law belonged to whoever owned it. In Breathitt County, it was owned by the Hargis brothers.
Judge James Hargis kept the county's books, its jail and its sheriff. Ed Callahan wore the badge and answered to no one but the Judge. When a stubborn lawyer named James Marcum began filing papers that could break their hold, the town of Jackson learned what that kind of power costs. A man was shot dead in the courthouse door in broad daylight, and a street full of witnesses suddenly couldn't remember a thing.
But the killings were only the beginning. Behind the Judge stood a quieter brother, a man who never raised his voice, never fired a shot and never lost a dollar he didn't mean to lose. As the trials, the troops and the newspapers came, and as the family fortune began to come apart, one Hargis was counting every move. Some debts in Breathitt are paid in blood. Others are collected over a lifetime.
Drawn from court records and newspaper accounts of the feud the nation called "Bloody Breathitt," Bloody Breathitt Bastards is a brutal, unflinching historical novel about kinship, greed and the men who ruled Kentucky by the gun, and about what was left of them when it was over.