Readers and writers who mourn fiction's loss of subject would do well to catch up on Mary Lee Settle. I say catch up because this vigorous writer has since 1954 published eight novels that gobble up time and geography and make their way through the bloodlines of family dynasties, rendering the world from 17th-century England to 20th-century Turkey. And though she has had her champions …, she has experienced the peculiar lack of recognition sometimes suffered by strong-willed writers no matter how good or voluminous their work.

Miss Settle's ninth novel is "The Scapegoat," and it takes place in West Virginia in the year 1912. This is home territory for the author, the setting of her Beulah trilogy, a families-on-the-land saga spanning two centuries of American life. (p. 1)

The author's resolution of [the plot] is almost secondary. An act of violence occurs, a scapegoat bears off the inequities of Lacey Creek...