The wettest county in the world

A fact-based novel in which writer Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1934 in search of a story on the area's moonshiners and becomes caught up in the investigating the link between an attack on restaurant owner Forrest Bondurant that left him with his throat slashed, the arrival at the same hospital where Bondurant is recovering of two additional brutalized victims, and a rumored cache of bootlegging money.