McCrumb's (Prayers the Devil Answers, 2016, etc.) latest combines an Appalachian ghost story with a turn-of-the-last-century murder case.
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"McCrumb's novel is much like Sevier's exploits—a slow march to an inevitable conclusion."
Southern writer McCrumb, author of a series of Appalachian ballad novels (The Ballad of Tom Dooley, 2011, etc.), puts her hand to the Revolutionary War as the Overmountain militia men of North Carolina push off the British.
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"Though the fact-based story is set in 1935, the pressures sound very contemporary, and that's McCrumb's point. This time, though, the modern parallels, which tell you pretty much what you already knew about crime, fame and the media, are the weakest link in this lustrous chain."
Nora Bonesteel's first case finds the seer (The Songcatcher, 2001, etc.) in full possession of her equivocal gift at age 12.
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"Still, this book of moments is required reading for anybody who still mourns Number Three—or who wonders what the fuss is about."
In a career marked by strange, wonderful stories (Ghost Riders, 2003, etc.), McCrumb offers her strangest yet: a modern-day Canterbury Tales with Dale Earnhardt replacing Thomas à Becket.
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"Unlike McCrumb's Ballad tales, which dramatized the convergence of multiple generations, this patchwork daringly leaves each story suspended, linked only by the inconclusive verdicts of history and the rush of ghost riders bound for glory."
A sprawling, multilayered tale: Deep, deep under the surface of Union and Confederate ideology teem the Appalachian folk for whom "the wrong side was to take a side" in the War Between the States.
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"McCrumb's latest in her ballad series (The Ballad of Frankie Silver, 1998, etc.) is as rich and dense as Scotch shortbread, filled with humor and surprise as it spans two continents and nearly three centuries."
Kidnapped as a child from his home in the Scottish island of Islay, Malcolm MacCourry brought three things with him to the New World: a stone from Iona, the Holy Isle, to guard against drowning; a curse that no MacCourry will love his firstborn child best; and a song.
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"As the plots interweave, their common themes—our obsession with beauty, our retreat from truth, and our denial of madness—resonate through McCrumb's sensitive, elegant language."
These are dark times for Elizabeth MacPherson (If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him . . . , 1995, etc.).
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A summons to a long-delayed execution—Fate Harkryder, the condemned man he arrested 20 years ago, has reached the end of his appeals—sends Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood back in time over 150 years to the case of Frankie Silver, the teenaged bride and mother who was hanged in North Carolina in 1832 for killing her husband with an ax, dismembering his body, and burning it in front of their baby daughter in their one-room cabin (an outrage that turned the locals against her more powerfully than the murder itself).
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"No particular standouts—McCrumb really needs the novel length to shine—but a revealing sketchbook of two dozen tales exploring the quicksilver border between mystery and magic."
Not many mystery writers use story collections as crossover books, but McCrumb's versatility in novels as different as Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992) and The Rosewood Casket (1996) makes the transition here seem inevitable.
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Quite a homecoming for stricken Tennessee patriarch Randall Stargill's four sons: Their first family reunion in years includes at least one dead member, a child whose bones are duly presented to the family by elderly seer Nora Bonesteel.
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"By turns funny, probing, elegiac, and as wise about history as McCrumb has ever been: another stellar performance from one of the best. (Mystery Guild main selection; author tour)"
The latest in McCrumb's Ballad series (The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, 1992, etc.) takes off from the legendary tale of Katie Wyler.
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"Bar none, McCrumb is the funniest woman writing mysteries today."
What at first seems an awkward juxtaposition—the last gasp of the Confederacy, as experienced by young Gabriel Hawks in 1865, set against the trials and tribulations of the spanking new law partnership of brainy A.P. Hill, a Civil War reenactor, and Bill MacPherson, her unambitious, naive office-mate—soon becomes an intricately plotted southern frolic.
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"Compelling, in the manner of a folk tale, despite the rather limp prose."
Here, McCrumb turns serious as she explores death from many angles: the matter-of-factness of a backwoodswoman with the gift of Sight; the get-even attitude of two old friends, one dying from the willful contamination of the Little Dover River by the Titan Paper Company; the emotional trauma paralyzing a brother and sister (who were subjects of physical abuse and witnesses to a family bloodbath and suicide); and the despair of a three-year-old who loses his mother, and of a pregnant woman who loses her unborn child.
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Here, the frisky McCrumb (If I Ever Return, Pretty Peggy-O, The Windsor Knot—both 1990), with deadpan humor and bull's-eye accuracy, skewers the science fiction genre, its eccentric authors, and outlandish fans and their nitpicking fanzines.
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