Books by Sharyn McCrumb

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. Read full book review >

Nora Bonesteel's first case finds the seer (The Songcatcher, 2001, etc.) in full possession of her equivocal gift at age 12. Read full book review >

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. Read full book review >

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. Read full book review >

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. Now country singer Lark MacCourry, born Linda Walker, eldest child of Judge Jack Walker, is searching for that song, dimly remembered from her Tennessee childhood. So obsessed is Lark with the ancient ballad, which tells of a Scottish shepherdess who grapples with the ghost of a Viking princess and wins a magic stone that will give her firstborn the Sight, that even when her tiny plane crashes on a flight from California—en route to a deathbed visit with her estranged father back home—she uses the last call on her failing cell phone to beg police dispatcher Ben Hawkins to help her find it. And Ben turns to Nora Bonesteel, the village wisewoman, whose gift of the Sight can't help her find Lark, but whose peerless knowledge of rural Tennessee culture can help Lark find her 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 >