The Which Way Tree

In 1866 Texas hill country, a panther attacks the Shreve family homestead, killing the freed-slave mother and leaving her 6-year-old daughter Samantha with a scarred face and a single fixation: find the panther and kill it. Ten years later, her older half-brother Benjamin narrates a sworn legal deposition recounting the years-long hunt that followed, the Tejano outlaw Clarence Hanlin and the haunted preacher Mister Pacheco who joined the chase, and the tracking dog Zechariah that made the pursuit possible. Crook writes the entire book in Benjamin's plainspoken deposition voice, building a Texas frontier quest that critics have placed next to True Grit and Huckleberry Finn.