Zeb Dupree is down on his luck in New Orleans when he finds a one-eyed abandoned puppy in a trash can.  Zeb’s wife is leaving him for another man, his father recently committed suicide, and he just lost his job as a newspaper editor.   In the midst of this mid-life crisis, Zeb heads back to Cedar Springs, North Carolina, the town where he attended college on a scholarship in the 1960s.

The novel alternates between the present and flashbacks of Zeb’s life growing up in the fictional Seaton, N.C.   This emotional shuffling between the past and present intensifies Zeb’s struggling efforts to rebuild his life.   After his return to Cedar Springs, Zeb works as a condo painter and a fiddler in a traveling country-rock band, dates an artist named Jenny, and tries to reconnect with his family.   His family members are also plagued by the loss of their father and the stress experienced by a younger brother who is a Vietnam vet.   Zeb begins to find peace (or at least patience) when he buys the property surrounding his father’s old house and begins to renovate the structure and farm the land.

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

Posted: October 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, March, Stephen, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Dorothy Borden is the much-loved daughter of Granston’s first African American lawyer. Dorothy went north for her education, but after a failed marriage she comes back home.  If her first marriage was a mistake, her second marriage is a disaster.  Joe Cephus Divine is the town’s first black police officer.  Joe is a proud but angry man.  To improve his status, Joe plans to marry an educated woman, preferably a school teacher.  Dorothy is a college professor, and she soon flees his abuse.  When Joe marries again, the shoe is on the other foot.  Johnnye Jamison, a school teacher from Pennsylvania, may feign interest in the men who pursue her, but for her marriage is just the route to a man’s money.  With drugs supplied by a lover elsewhere, Johnnye kills off her husbands.  Years later when Dorothy returns to Granston, she learns what happened to Joe and she comes to terms with her own choices and the town she grew up in.

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

Posted: October 29th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Bowen, Sandra E., Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Alma Curtis is a bit of a busybody, but she is also a loyal member of King’s Chapel, an historic African-American church in Lovette, North Carolina.  Arriving early to make the final preparations for the church’s 100th anniversary service, she is shocked to hear her pastor, Jonathan Pierce, being threatened by Myron King, the great-grandson of the church’s founder. Winston Beckana is a relative newcomer to the church, but when the church secretary asks Winston, a retired computer expert, to look at the church’s financial records, he can see that something is wrong.  Pastor Pierce knows that something is wrong–his wife is addicted to cocaine and her addiction has put the pastor under King’s thumb. The Pierces know that the situation can’t go on, but when Winston Beckana is murdered, they realize that others in their community have been hurt by their weaknesses.

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

Posted: October 26th, 2009 under 2000-, 2007, McFarland, Shirlita K., Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont.
Comments: none

Being a bit of a softy gets Eleanor Swift in trouble. When her delivery driver calls in “sick” Eleanor think she can handle A Slice of Delight’s deliveries herself that night.  Her one late night delivery is to the home of Richard Olsen, someone whose advances she very publicly rebuffed at her town’s most recent harvest festival.  Pizza in hand, Eleanor looks in through Richard’s front door, only to see that someone has stabbed him with a large kitchen knife.

The image of Eleanor juggling her cell phone and the pizza box is a great start to this light-hearted mystery.  Because of that incident at the festival, Eleanor is suspected of the murder by the police chief, who happens to be her high school beau.  When public opinion, as measured by sales at her pizzeria, seems to turn against her, Eleanor enlists her sister Maddy to help her investigate the crime.  Along the way, the reader gets introduced to a town full of characters.

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

Posted: October 23rd, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Cavender, Chris, Mountains, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places.
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

The “trouble” in the title is murder.  The atmosphere should be one of happy anticipation at Fort House, for Dorothy McGregor and Dr. Lewis Parker are to be married in two days.  But the house is inhabited by poltergeists, an invalid aunt who just might oppose the marriage, and her nurse who has a mysterious past.  When Dr. Parker asks Dr. Gaskell, another local physician, to look in on Aunt Mary, they argue over her condition.  The next morning, when Dr. Gaskell is found dead, the soon-to-be bridegroom is the prime suspect.

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

Posted: October 2nd, 2009 under 1920-1929, 1922, Coastal Plain, Moore, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Novels to Read Online, Poate, Ernest M..
Comments: none

First a few animals–cattle and then pigs–were savagely killed by an unknown assailant. The people in the town of Doe Springs assumed the assailant was a wild animal, the kind that live in the nearby mountains.  Then people started to die in the same manner, and the townsfolk begin to fear that a human–or superhuman–killer is in their midst. Ivy Cole knows that they’re right, because she’s that killer.  Ivy is a werewolf, but she has the power to control herself, and she attacks only people who she thinks deserve to die.  But soon Ivy’s world is turned upside down when people close to her begin to die, and it’s clear that she’s not the only murderer in Doe Springs. Ivy needs to find that other killer before Sheriff Gloria Hubbard and an outside expert find out about her powers.

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

Posted: September 25th, 2009 under 2000-, 2005, Farago, Gina, Horror, Mountains, Mystery, Novels Set in Fictional Places.
Comments: none

This is a novel about prejudice and opportunism.  The time is immediately prior to World War II.  Luther Perrin is a wealthy man in Somerset (Wilmington).  Perrin’s racist assumptions fit right in with those of his peers, but his active anti-Semitism is a surprise to his family and  friends.  When Perrin decides to develop one of the beaches near Somerset as a private, Christians-only resort, he hires the unscrupulous Cole Rives as an assistant. Rives eggs on Perrin, with disastrous consequences for many people.

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

Posted: September 18th, 2009 under 1940-1949, 1946, Coast, MacDuffie, Laurette, New Hanover, Novels Set in Fictional Places.
Comments: none

It is September 22, 1989 and Hurricane Hugo is leaving its dark mark on Lystra, North Carolina. The power is out and the community is astir. The locals, and extended locals, are milling about the town attempting to work, corral their livestock or pets, party, and, of course, make last minute, emergency runs to the local grocery store. During all this the reader gets insights into the lives of the town’s inhabitants through 12 seemingly independent narratives that together tell the story of this small town and the day Hurricane Hugo hit.

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

Posted: September 11th, 2009 under 2000-, 2009, Brown, Nic, Humor, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none

This three-in-one collection tells the love stories of three women living in three very different times across the state.  Lauralee Bliss’ novella, Journey to Love, begins in London, where Beth Colman has just buried her father.   With nothing left for her in Britain, she sets out for America in 1650 with Judith, her sister, and Mark, Judith’s husband.  The trio is trying to solve the mystery of their ancestors who were some of the original settlers of the lost colony of Roanoke, but Beth is looking for more.  Guided by her strong faith, and the hardy John Harris who knows the country well, she just might find love during the journey.

In Lynn A. Coleman’s Corduroy Road to Love, Ida Mae McAuley is strong, single woman with a brilliant mind for business living in 1830s Charlotte.  She’s caught between the affection of two men, both of whom are hiding something.  Ida Mae must use her keen sense to figure out who she’ll trust with her heart.

Tamela Hancock Murray tells the story of a Drusie, a small town singer in the 1930s in her novella The Music of Home.  Drusie is happy and successful in Sunshine Holler – she’s engaged to the love of her life, Gladdie Gordon, and sings at Church on Sunday with her sister.  When Drusie is given the chance to risk it all and enter showbiz, will Drusie leave her mountain home and loved ones behind?

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

Posted: September 4th, 2009 under 2000-, 2007, Bliss, Lauralee, Coast, Coleman, Lynn A., Dare, Historical, Mecklenburg, Mountains, Murray, Tamela Hancock, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont, Religious/Inspirational, Romance/Relationship.
Comments: none