So Shall the Tree Grow

Family loyalties, deadly feuds, and international drug wars are brought to life in Ninie Hammon's new intergenerational tale set in present-day Kentucky, four decades after the rise and fall of the Cornbread Mafia.

When Ruth Hannacker finds a "just-in-case-anything-happens-to-me" letter among her mother's things after she was killed in a tornado, it opens a new chapter in the family's decades-long, fraught, and often tragic story with Righteous Weed.

The letter from Jessica Monaghan Hannacker tells of the Tree House, a propane tank buried in the ground where Willie Ray Taggart stashed his marijuana money back in the heyday of the Cornbread Mafia. When Ruth finds the Tree House, she discovers $75,000 in cash and quart jars of Righteous Weed seed, the finest strain of marijuana ever developed.

Over the protests of 72-year-old Riley Hannacker, the only remaining living member of the original Cornbread Mafia, the family...