Pursuing Daisy Garfield by Otis Bulfinch

The beautiful and enigmatic Daisy Garfield occupies the center of this tale about a woman's search for meaning in the 19th century Ozarks backwoods. Resourceful beyond her years, Daisy fends off the predatory advances of a teacher, a preacher, and a corrupt lawman in strikingly violent ways. Her resources come to an end when her husband John accidentally splits his shin with an axe. When gangrene sets in, she asks a passing trapper, William Crawford, to end John's suffering. In the vain hope that Daisy will give herself to him, William consents to kill her husband, an act that plunges him into guilt and self-recrimination. Crawford's misgivings take an unexpected turn when a group of hardscrabble homesteaders enlist him in their search for John's killer. When they discover not just one, but two rotted corpses, the mystery deepens for them all. Meanwhile, Daisy undergoes her own search for peace and security as she navigates alone the dangers of the Ozarks. As intelligent as she is beautiful, Daisy struggles to reconcile the claims of religion with the evils inflicted upon her. Pursuing Daisy Garfield is at once a mystery and a profound meditation on the hope that "beauty will save the world." Written in the backwoods vernacular of the Ozarks, readers will be reminded of the gritty and elegiac writing found in the novels of Cormac McCarthy.