The unrest of the Regulators and the fight for American independence are of little interest to many of the residents of River Plantation in Chowan County. The beautiful Angela Ferrier busies herself with romances even as her step-father, who sits on the Governor’s Council, fears for North Carolina and his family.  Only when Angela finds herself torn between a dashing British spy and a handsome American army captain does she realize the perils of her times. Although essentially a romance, the last quarter of the book gives a good account of the fighting in North and South Carolina in the fall of 1780.

This is one of the novel’s in Fletcher’s series of novels about North Carolina in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 20th, 2009 under 1940-1949, 1946, Chowan, Coast, Fletcher, Inglis, Historical, Novels in Series, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none

Blue Calhoun narrates the story of his adult years in Raleigh during the 1950s from the distance of old age.  He begins his story in his mid-thirties, when he is working at a store that sells sheet music and instruments.  One day at work, an old friend from school stops by the store with her daughter Luna, who is not much older than Blue’s daughter Madelyn.  At 16, Luna is a talented young musician, and her dark hair, good looks, and confidence catch Blue’s interest.  As the story unfolds, Blue has to grapple with his feelings for Luna and wanting to protect his wife and daughter.  Second and third chances can’t prevent how the reverberations of how Blue’s unfaithful actions will affect his family, including his granddaughter, for whom the story is narrated.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 20th, 2009 under 1990-1999, 1992, Piedmont, Price, Reynolds, Wake.
Comments: none

The year is 1945 in this sequel to Hostetter’s earlier novel, Blue.  Ann Fay has returned from treatment in a polio hospital and her beloved father is back from the war.  Ann Fay thinks that she understands the changes that occurred at home during the war–the deprivation, the polio epidemic that killed her younger brother and disabled her–but she has no understanding of what her father went through.  Her father suffers from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.  Ann Fay and her father are both in search of healing and peace of mind–”comfort”.   Ann Fay is helped on her path by caring neighbors and treatment at the Warm Springs, Georgia polio treatment center.  Her father’s healing path is lonelier and the outcome uncertain.

Comfort touches on themes of family, community, racial prejudice, and social class, but the novel never bogs down in any way.  Ann Fay’s voice rings true in this beautiful coming-of-age story.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 13th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Catawba, Children & Young Adults, Hostetter, Joyce Moyer, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Life in the suburbs of Fayetteville is not necessarily what it seems to be.  For the Myles family, their seemingly perfect life is about to be turned upside down.  Jefferson and Margo have a marriage that has lasted a quarter century, four grown, adoring children, thriving careers, and a cozy house in a nice, friendly neighborhood.  To Margo’s horror, she discovers that Jefferson has embezzled some of his clients’ funds and is heavily involved in the dangerous “Operation Stingray.”   This criminal organization is stealing ammunition from Fort Bragg to sell to Honduran rebels (all with the help of insiders and dirty cops).  Jefferson’s mistakes have put his family and friends in peril.  As if that’s not enough, Jefferson is having a steamy affair with the next-door neighbor, Linda–whose husband has just been murdered.  Margo must find the strength to protect her family while searching for a way to cope with her husband’s destructive misdeeds.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 10th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Coastal Plain, Cumberland, Perkins, Suzetta, Suspense/Thriller.
Comments: none

• Southern Fatality. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2007.
• Southern Poison. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2008.
• Southern Peril. New York: Minotaur Books, 2009.

Jersey Barnes was a Marine MP and a government anti-terrorism agent.  After leaving government service, she moved back to Wilmington to open up her own security firm.  When even that feels like too much, Jersey decides to retire to the less stressful life of being a pub owner.  Running a pub, marrying her boyfriend, it’s called settling down.  It sounds good, but Jersey is a sociable gal and everyone from her boyfriend to family friends to the federal government wants Jersey to handle just one more case.  These cases involve everything from kidnapping to blackmail to computer crimes to drug dealing–and murder.  Jersey can handle what the bad guys send her way, but family and friends are another story.  Jersey’s pill-trading, poker playing dad, his girlfriend, Fran, a computer-hacker neighbor, and Jersey’s hunky business partner, Ox, complicate her life and add humor and energy to these mysteries.  Wilmington itself is a character in the books, and fans of the city will recognize familiar places.

Posted: November 10th, 2009 under Coast, Mystery, New Hanover, Novels in Series, Ocean, T. Lynn, Series.
Comments: none

This novel picks up where Blackman’s Coffin (2008) left off.  Iraq veteran Sam Blackman and Nakayla Robertson have opened a detective agency in Asheville.  Their first client is an elderly woman who wants them to return a manuscript she stole from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his heirs.  Shortly after Blackman retrieves the lock box containing the manuscript from the woman’s bank, the box is stolen from his office and the building’s security guard is killed.  Blackman is also attacked, but the friend who saves him brings the message that rogues operatives from his Iraq days are out to get him.  It appears that two different groups think that Blackman has riches that they want.

Like the earlier Sam Blackman novel, Asheville’s literary heritage figures in the plot.  This new novel also brings in some controversial elements of the area’s past, including the World War II era POW camp in Hendersonville and the American fascist William Dudley Pelley.  It makes for a heady mix and a great story.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 9th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Buncombe, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, deCastrique, Mark.
Comments: none

• Blackman’s Coffin. Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2008.
• The Fitzgerald Ruse. Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2009.

In the first book in this series, Sam Blackman is a wounded Iraq War veteran who comes to Asheville for rehabilitation.  A job offer from the head of a local security firm provides him with a new career path, even though his employer dies before Sam’s first day on the job.  Sam teams up, professionally and personally, with the dead woman’s sister and together Sam and Nakayla Robertson investigate routine and not-so-routine occurrences in Asheville and the surrounding area.

Asheville’s literary past has figured in the first two novels, and each book is rich in local history and culture.  This series nicely weaves the city’s interesting past with contemporary elements such as Sam’s military service in Iraq.

Posted: November 9th, 2009 under Buncombe, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, Series, deCastrique, Mark.
Comments: none

Outer Banks lore and description are nicely woven into this tale of murder. When two Ohio families come to the Outer Banks for a vacation, they find that they haven’t left all their troubles behind.  Byron Butler, father and minister, is still tormented by disturbing dreams, and young Dugan Walton struggles to be understood and accepted.  Dugan is thought to be “the boy who cried wolf” when he claims to have seen a young woman’s body in the weeds.  Byron’s daughter, Chrissy, is a happy young woman of eighteen, but when she starts seeing a street magician she meets on the trip, her father’s unease increases. Bryon comes to believe that God has brought him to Corolla to prevent a killer from murdering another young woman.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 6th, 2009 under 2000-, 2007, Coast, Currituck, Ellis, Joe C., Mystery.
Comments: none

Ella Dubose, a 70-something Southern lady, has been a Charlotte resident for almost a half a century, but she left some part of her heart in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.  When her younger children start to pester her about her her driving and her health (they thinks she’s getting senile), Ella takes off for a small inn at Myrtle Beach.  There she reflects on her early life in South Carolina, especially her relationship with the man who might be the father of her eldest son.  She summons that son to join her at the inn.  Will she have the courage to tell him about her early life, or will the prospect of a romance with another guest at the inn turn her mind to happier things?

Most of the action in this novel takes place in South Carolina.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: November 2nd, 2009 under 2000-, 2008, Mecklenburg, Piedmont, Villas, James.
Comments: none

Asheville is called Furmville in this novel, but readers will recognize the Asheville of the early twentieth century.  The city is a haven for tuberculosis patient from all along the eastern seaboard.  One of these patients, Miss Fulton, has been accompanied by her older sister, Mrs. Withers, a beautiful and fairly well-to-do woman.  As the novel opens, the younger woman finds her older sister dead in the living room of the bungalow they share. Mrs. Withers has been strangled and her jewels have been stolen.  Has she been murdered by a stranger or someone in her circle?  Police chief Greenleaf is aided in his investigations by an Atlanta detective who is recuperating in Furmville.  Their conversations move the investigation forward; those conversations also reveal the racial and social attitudes of the period.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

Posted: October 23rd, 2009 under 1910-1919, 1919, Buncombe, Hay, James, Mountains, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places.
Comments: none