Ron Rash, author of "One Foot in Eden" and "Saints at the River," has written another powerful novel of Appalachia. They only get better.

George Pemberton, of Boston, owns the Pemberton Lumber Co. that is clear-cutting Haywood County of its hardwood forest. The year is 1929, and the timber tycoon has just returned to Waynesville, N.C., with his new bride, Serena. He is met at the train station by an enraged knife-wielding father who has a pregnant daughter in tow.

After Pemberton easily turns the knife on the mountaineer, it is Serena who calmly removes the offending instrument from the dead man's abdomen and hands it to her husband's former mistress.

"Sell it," she tells the horrified girl, "it's all you will ever get from me or my husband." The new Mrs. Pemberton is as vicious, and as mesmerizing, as the mountain rattlesnakes she hunts with an eagle.

The woman moves like a blizzard through this Appalachian tale that reads like a Highlands murder ballad, destroying every obstacle in her path, pushing her husband to more dastardly acts, testing his love and his loyalty. A devoted one-hand assassin follows her like a puppy and does her nefarious bidding.

The only forces holding the Pembertons' ambitious and audacious deeds in check are a good-hearted sheriff and a mild but stubborn ecologist, Horace Kephart, a disciple of Teddy Roosevelt's national park program.

George and Serena represent the worst of unbridled capitalism on the edge of the Great Depression when American industry was a rapacious, unregulated system that chewed up the country's natural and human resources equally. Logging deaths in the Pemberton camp are so frequent that the company has its own cemetery.

Rash, head of Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University, has a masterful command of mountain history and lore that reveals itself on every page and leavens the violence and the rather bleak setting. If poetry is in the details, this is a poetic novel, and its imagery will hold you in thrall long after you close the book.