Eleanor Cane drives north from Atlanta with everything she owns in the back seat and no particular plan beyond settling the estate of a great-aunt she barely knew. What she finds at the end of a mountain road in North Georgia is a house that has been waiting for her, a two-hundred-year-old journal left open on the kitchen table, and a larder unlike anything she has ever cooked from.

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Nora is a cultural anthropologist who has spent her career studying how communities sustain themselves through food. She knows how to read a landscape, how to listen to a place, how to understand what a community's kitchen says about what that community believes. She thought she was coming to the mountains to settle an estate. The mountains have a different understanding of why she is here.

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As she cooks her way through the journal's seasonal preparations, using the extraordinary wild harvest of the Blue Ridge hollows, ramps and chanterelles and spicebush berries and pawpaw and the strange concentrated sweetness of sourwood honey, she begins to understand that the food is doing something she cannot fully explain. And as she investigates the decades of unexplained disappearances connected to the property, she begins to understand that the explanation she is building may be entirely correct about the facts and entirely wrong about the meaning.

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The Hollow Ground is a novel, a mystery, and a genuine cookbook in equal measure. Its thirty recipes are written in Nora's voice and can be made by any careful home cook. Its mythology is rooted in the real traditions of the people who have lived in these mountains for centuries: Cherokee, Scots-Irish, German, Welsh, Hoodoo, the layered syncretic spiritual life of a landscape most fiction ignores entirely.

Some places hold the people who belong to them. This is one of those places.

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Nora is starting to understand that she may be one of those people.