The Widows by Jess Montgomery

Set in Vinton County in the southeastern Ohio coalfields in the 1920s, the protagonist of this novel is Lily Ross, inspired by Maude Collins, Ohio’s first female sheriff and the only one to serve as an Ohio sheriff for over fifty subsequent years. To investigate her husband’s murder in the line of duty as the previous sheriff, Lily Ross turns to Marvena Whitcomb, whose husband has just been killed in the mines. This character, a union activist, was partially inspired by Mother Jones. The Widows is the first novel of Jess Montgomery who grew up in Ohio nurtured by an Eastern Kentucky family and now covers literature for the Dayton Daily News and is the Executive Director of the Antioch Writers Workshop in nearby Yellow Springs "In the hard-luck, homespun Appalachian town of Kinship, Ohio, in 1924, two strong women become unlikely comrades to solve a murder in this flinty, heartfelt mystery that sings of hawks and history, of coal mines and the urgent fight for social justice."―Julia Kel