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. Read full book review >
These are dark times for Elizabeth MacPherson (If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him . . . , 1995, etc.). Read full book review >
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). Read full book review >
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. Read full book review >
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. Read full book review >
Looks like open season on cheating husbands in Danville, Virginia. Read full book review >
The latest in McCrumb's Ballad series (The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, 1992, etc.) takes off from the legendary tale of Katie Wyler. Read full book review >
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. Read full book review >
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. Read full book review >
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. Read full book review >
