• 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

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

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

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

Anyone who has worked in a library or a used bookstore knows that any bag or box of donated books can contain a surprise–a treasure in among the ragged discards of someone’s bookshelves, basement, or attic. When bookstore owner Jo Sharpe agrees to take the odds and ends that once belonged to the late Bridie MacPherson she gets two surprises–a cat she names “Marlowe” and the diary of Cristabel Lamonte. Christabel, the daughter of a plantation owner on the Carolina coast in the early 1700s, lived an unremarkable life until she was kidnapped by the pirate Edward Teach (”Blackbeard”).  Jo becomes obsessed with what happened to Cristabel–and the buried treasure that her diary mentions. As her investigations take her up and down the coast, several murders ensue.

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

Posted: September 25th, 2009 under 2000-, 2004, Coast, Dare, Historical, Hyde, Masek, Linda Lehmann, Mystery.
Comments: none