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

This novel’s North Carolina setting is a bit of a surprise since the author, DuBose Heyward, is strongly associated with that other Carolina–particularly the city of Charleston, the setting for his novel Porgy.  Porgy was the basis for Porgy and Bess, the play, movie and great George Gershwin opera.

Angel is set among the mountaineers of the Great Smokies.  Buck Merritt is a handsome and daring young bootlegger, and the sweet and beautiful Angel Thornley is in love with him.  Angel’s father, a preacher, is opposed to her relationship with Buck.  When Reverend Thornley betrays Buck to the revenue officers, Buck is sent away to do hard time.  What the reverend didn’t know is that Angel is pregnant with Buck’s child.   To save his reputation in the community, Rev. Thornley arranges a hasty marriage between Angel and old Stan Galloway.  Angel and her son spend six years with Galloway until the construction of a road through the mountains brings job opportunities for Galloway and a convict road crew that includes Buck.

This is a lyrical novel that conveys both the beauty of the mountains and the values of the individuals who live there.  The scenes at Rev. Thornley’s revival services are especially vivid.

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

Posted: November 6th, 2009 under 1920-1929, 1926, Heyward, DuBose, Mountains.
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

To Make My Bread follows the McClure family during the years 1900-1929.  Initially, they are mountaineers, self-sufficient on their small plot of land.  Most of their neighbors live as they do, except for the Swains, who own the store in their community.  When the family is swindled out of their land by timber speculators, they move to a mill town forty miles away.

Not all family members adjust to the move.  The two younger children, John and Bonnie become the primary breadwinners, and they are radicalized by their experiences. Bonnie also struggles with the conflict between the demands of industrialized work and traditional expectations for women.  She becomes an important figure in the nascent labor movement in the town.

Part family saga, part political novel, To Make My Bread is one of six novels from the 1930s  based on the Gastonia textile strike of 1929.  The book has been the subject of academic study, and it is still in print from the University of Illinois Press.

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

Posted: October 13th, 2009 under 1930-1939, 1932, Gaston, Historical, Lumpkin, Grace, Mountains, Piedmont.
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

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

Jemma Chase’s parents own a dude ranch near Boone where she works as a trail leader.   The ranch’s dining hall serves as a gathering place for locals as well as guests, with good food and better gossip.  When a rash of strange crimes begin to happen in town, Detective Tucker and his partner investigate all possible suspects, including Jemma.  The crimes become more serious, and then Jemma’s horse finds a dead body near a trail.  Tucker realizes that Jemma isn’t a suspect, she’s a target.  Jemma’s natural curiousity leads her to play CSI and investigate the crimes on her own in order to help Detective Tucker and the police department find out who is behind the crimes.   Detective Tucker is impressed with Jemma’s moxie, leaving readers to wonder if his desire to serve and protect is purely professional.

This is the third novel in Bishop’s Appalachian Adventure series.

Posted: September 12th, 2009 under 2000-, 2006, Bishop, Maggie, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, Romance/Relationship, Watauga.
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