In "Tuscarora," The life of a young man is turned upside down in 1970 when he is implicated in a murder. A wanted man, he escapes to the Appalachian Trail where he spends decades among the high ridges and valleys of the Appalachians as an anonymous exile known only as Walker. Fate ultimately leads him to the valley of the Tuscarora where he reconnects with two women who loved him when he was sixteen. One has become a cold and calculating Lieutenant Governor who, in 2002, will be running for the Governorship of Pennsylvania, which she sees as a stepping stone to the Presidency in 2008. Her gubernatorial run is under the tutelage of a Machiavellian political operative who is seeking redemption after having been associated with a corrupt President: "I want the White House. I want to feel the power again, power that weighs on one's shoulders like a shroud of heavy metal. I want to be in a room where a single word sends billions of dollars flowing or mobilizes armies. I want to be in the middle of a media crowd that hovers endlessly with the hope it will hear a single phrase that might make a headline. There is nothing like it, and I want to feel it again." The second woman has existed in Walker's mind as a decades-long dream until he stumbles back into her life, a life rife with the challenges that blue-collar American women must face in their world, one which is still a man's world in the mountains of Pennsylvania in 2001: "I'm talking about what should happen between two people who tell the world they love each other by being married, and that doesn't mean going through the motions, pretending you love somebody. I was a fraud. I lived a lie, and I did it because I was scared. It doesn't justify what I did, but I was scared...scared of being alone, of not being able to make it on my own." True love, pure hatred, passion and murder unfold in "Tuscarora."