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

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

Stokes Jackson is a slick political operative who comes down to Asheville from New York to run Wayne Gilmore’s state senate campaign. It’s the early 1920s and women have just gotten the right to vote, so a key part of Jackson’s strategy is to persuade women to vote for his candidate.  However, Gilmore’s opponent is a woman, Joan Bellamy.  Jackson’s first thought is to throw mud on Bellamy, but before he can do that he is murdered.  The whole Bellamy family comes under suspicion.  Only with the help of a detective is Joan able to prove her innocence, and as the novel ends her personal and professional futures look quite bright.

Because there were two factual errors early in the book (Asheville is not in Orange County and Marshall, not Madison, is the county seat of Madison County), I was ready to dismiss this novel, assuming that the author hadn’t spent much time in the state. In fact, James Hay Jr. spent over a decade in Asheville, working some of that time at the Asheville Citizen.  And, in 1920, a woman, Lillian Exum Clement, was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly from Buncombe County.

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

Posted: October 6th, 2009 under 1920-1929, 1925, Buncombe, Hay, James, Madison, Mountains, Mystery.
Comments: none

Four young boys from the North seek adventure in the mountains around Asheville.  They find hospitable Southerners, ornery sheriffs, runaway horses, moonshiners, and a long-lost brother. The plot might not hold the attention of the YouTube generation, but the cover illustration will delight all who see it.

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

Posted: September 8th, 2009 under 1910-1919, 1912, Buncombe, Children & Young Adults, Lincoln, Andrew Carey, Mountains.
Comments: none

This volume contains the first five books in the Mandie series of children’s books set in the early 20th century. The main character, Amanda “Mandie” Shaw, lives in the Nantahala Mountains with her family, where she goes adventuring and solves mysteries. In the first few books, Mandie is helped by her best friend Joe Woodward.  She meets another helpful pal, Celia Hamilton, after she is sent to boarding school in Asheville. Mandie’s cat, Snowball, also makes frequent appearances in the books.  Recurring themes in the books are Mandie’s attempts to behave properly, her Christian faith, and her partial-Cherokee background.  Titles included in this volume include: Mandie and the Secret Tunnel, Mandie and the Cherokee Legend, Mandie and the Ghost Bandits, Mandie and the Forbidden Attic, and Mandie and the Trunk’s Secret.

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

Posted: August 31st, 2009 under 2000-, 2007, Buncombe, Children & Young Adults, Leppard, Lois Gladys, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, Religious/Inspirational, Swain.
Comments: 2

Chief Warrant Officer Sam Blackman lost a leg in the Iraq War and, after testifying in Congress about the treatment of veterans, was sent where they figured he wouldn’t be able to cause any more trouble: Asheville, NC.  He is almost finished with his rehab when a local woman visits him and offers him a job with her security company.  She promises to visit again, but is murdered before she can do so.  After her death, a diary written by 12 year-old Henderson Youngblood in 1919 is found hidden in her apartment … and Sam’s name is on it.  Sam leaves the VA hospital and begins his civilian life by helping the deceased woman’s sister investigate the modern crime and its connections to a death in the diary.  This is the first book in de Castrique’s series of mysteries featuring the Sam Blackman character.

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

Posted: June 12th, 2009 under 2000-, 2008, Buncombe, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, deCastrique, Mark.
Comments: none

From the Heart of Covington continues the stories of Hannah, Amelia, and Grace, older ladies who share a house in the fictional town of Covington, NC. In this, the third book in the series, a close friend’s cancer impacts all of the women, but each has her own issues to contend with. Amelia furthers her photography career and takes a trip to New York. Grace volunteers at the local elementary school, deals with her son’s rocky relationship, and faces a diabetes diagnosis. Hannah is reunited with her estranged daughter and the younger woman, Laura, comes to live in Covington after she is seriously injured in a boating disaster.

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

Posted: May 30th, 2009 under 2000-, 2002, Buncombe, Medlicott, Joan, Mountains, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Novels in Series.
Comments: none

When Ellen Summers was twenty-nine, her parents died in a terrible car accident on the way to their cabin near Asheville. On that same day, Ellen’s marriage ended.  Five years later, Ellen’s parents appear in her dreams, urging her to return to the cabin.  When Ellen responds to the dreams by taking her summer vacation at the cabin, she sets in motion a series of events.  Love seems in offing, but Ellen has not let go of the hurt from her marriage, and the new man on the scene, wonderful though he is, has a connection to her parents’ deaths.  Ellen decides to leave her job in the federal government to run her late father’s mountain business, but she finds trouble and betrayal in this sphere too.  There are many characters and several subplots in this novel, but the love story moves to the satisfying conclusion that readers expect.

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

Posted: April 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Buncombe, Fleming, Hazel Rash, Mountains, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none

Hannah found true love when she married her business partner Max in Two Days after the Wedding. Of course, Hannah still lives mostly with her friends Amelia and Grace in the house across the street from Max’s.  It’s all working fine until Max’s son Zachary and his very pregnant wife arrive in Covington.  Zachary is an unhappy soul, and his father’s failure to tell him about his marriage is just one more grievance for Zachary. Hannah does her best to make things work, as she opens her heart to Zachary’s wife Sarina and the baby Sarah. The ladies of Covington are coping with health problems, but there is still a lot of life in the novel as Max helps Jose and Anna open a restaurant, Amelia decides that she wants a dog, and the town mobilizes against a scammer who preys on senior citizens.

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

Posted: April 27th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Buncombe, Medlicott, Joan, Mountains, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Novels in Series.
Comments: none