C.J. Mercer

Fiction from the Hiwassee corridor and the Smoky Mountain foothills

Between the Ridges — Book One

Around the Hiwassee,
your reputation is your life.

Something's been off along the corridor.
Five chapters. The trail guide to the area. Yours for free.

This side for correspondence

Send me the opening and the guide to the corridor.
I'll read it and see if it fits.

The Rating That Kills and trail guide preview

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The Rating That Kills

The Rating That Kills — Between the Ridges Book 1

When a Nashville marketing professional turns up dead near Reliance, Tennessee, the corridor's tourism economy barely registers the ripple. But eleven outfitters — from Etowah to Athens — are drowning in sudden one-star reviews — identical language, identical timing, identical damage.

Marly Dodd knows what a weaponized rating system looks like. Webb Sutton knows what the physical evidence actually says. Together, they follow the pattern from a dead man's laptop to a conspiracy that treats the corridor's livelihood as a line item.

In the Hiwassee corridor, your reputation is your life. Someone figured out how to kill both.

The Characters

Marly Dodd runs a shuttle route connecting Etowah, Reliance, and the river put-ins up toward Ducktown. She moved to this part of Tennessee a few years back and decided to stay, which surprised her more than anyone.

Webb Sutton has been guiding the Hiwassee and the Ocoee for twenty years. He keeps careful notes.

Neither one of them set out to investigate anything.

The Series

Between the Ridges is set along the Hiwassee and Ocoee corridors of southeastern Tennessee — Reliance, Benton, Etowah, Athens, Cleveland, Ducktown, and the long road down toward Chattanooga. This ground has been logged and mined and flooded and left to find its way back, and mostly it has. The people there stayed through all of that.

The pines had been coming back for forty years now, and mostly they had — green where it had been bare red clay his whole childhood, the ridgelines filling in the way a wound filled in, slowly and not quite the same. When he was a kid those hills had looked like Mars. He had not understood then that they were supposed to look like anything else. He understood it now, and that was the difference: you had to know what it had been to see what it still was.

— The Rating That Kills, Chapter 9

The series is written — six novels and two prequels. Eight books total. They release one a month, starting soon. I wanted to know where the road went before I asked anyone to follow it.

The opening of the story — and the guide to the corridor they don't explain out loud.
It costs nothing but attention. You'll know pretty quick if it fits.

Step into the corridor ↑

If you know someone who'd enjoy a good Tennessee mystery — a friend, a neighbor, someone who knows this part of the state — send them this page. I'd appreciate it.