Category Archives: New Hanover

New Hanover

by | November 10, 2009 · 5:03 pm

T. Lynn Ocean. The Jersey Barnes Series.

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.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2007, 2008, 2009, Coast, Mystery, New Hanover, Novels in Series, Ocean, T. Lynn, Series

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by | October 16, 2009 · 9:14 am

Nicholas Sparks. The Last Song. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.

Ronnie’s parents divorced when she was in middle school, and her dad left New York City and moved to the North Carolina coast.  It’s three years later, and Ronnie is still angry at her parents–especially her dad. Spending a summer with her father is the last thing that she wants to do, but Ronnie has no choice when her mother sends her and her younger brother Jonah to their dad’s home in Wrightsville Beach.

Ronnie’s been in trouble in New York, and when she falls in with a bad crowd in Wrightsville, it looks like more of the same.  Her dad’s response to her troubles helps to cool Ronnie’s anger.  Ronnie starts to appreciate her father, even as she also begins to fall in love with a local boy, Will.  But as Ronnie makes steps towards peace and happiness, there is a malevolent character who will block her path and something about her dad that she doesn’t yet know.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Coast, New Hanover, Sparks, Nicholas

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by | September 18, 2009 · 11:12 am

Margaret Maron. Sand Sharks. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.

A professional conference at Wrightsville Beach sounds like just the thing that Judge Deborah Knotts needs.  While her new husband is in Virginia tying up some loose ends of his previous life, Deborah can relax on the beach and catch up with old friends over long, leisurely dinners. There are the usual professional ambitions and jealousies on display, but none of it bothers Deborah until one of her colleagues is murdered.  The deceased was shark who had sullied his robes with unethical behavior.  Now that he’s dead all the other judges are talking about him, but Deborah’s interest in the crime is greater than most after she learns that one of those unethical acts involved a man who was Deborah’s big mistake from her college years.  But it turns out that there are many people in Wilmington connected to the murdered judge, and the suspect list grows accordingly.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Coast, Maron, Margaret, Mystery, New Hanover, Novels in Series

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by | · 9:47 am

Laurette MacDuffie. The Stone in the Rain. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1946.

This is a novel about prejudice and opportunism.  The time is immediately prior to World War II.  Luther Perrin is a wealthy man in Somerset (Wilmington).  Perrin’s racist assumptions fit right in with those of his peers, but his active anti-Semitism is a surprise to his family and  friends.  When Perrin decides to develop one of the beaches near Somerset as a private, Christians-only resort, he hires the unscrupulous Cole Rives as an assistant. Rives eggs on Perrin, with disastrous consequences for many people.

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

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Filed under 1940-1949, 1946, Coast, MacDuffie, Laurette, New Hanover, Novels Set in Fictional Places

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by | August 20, 2009 · 4:29 pm

Joyce and Jim Lavene. The Telltale Turtle. Woodbury, MN: Midnight Ink, 2008.

Mary Catherine Roberts is a pet psychic with her own syndicated radio show. Even without such a distinctive vocation, Mary Catherine would never be just a face in the crowd.  She’s a showy dresser, someone who speaks up for herself, and she runs a clinic for injured and abandoned animals right in the heart of downtown Wilmington.  One day on her way home from the radio station, Mary Catherine hears the voice of an injured, frightened animal.  She follows the voice to a house in Wilmington’s historic district.  The front door opens at her touch, and in the parlor Mary Catherine finds the body of a middle-aged woman and a bleeding turtle.  The dead woman was the aunt of the radio station manager, Colin Jamison.  The police suspect him of the murder, but Mary Catherine knows he’s not capable of it and Tommy, the turtle, assures her that Colin is not the killer.  Mary Catherine tries to work with the police (who give no credence to her insights) even as her life is complicated by the attentions of two men who show interest in becoming Mary Catherine’s husband #5.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2008, Coast, Lavene, Jim and Joyce, Mystery, New Hanover

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by | August 18, 2009 · 9:16 am

Cheryl Renée Herbsman. Breathing. New York: Viking, 2009.

Savannah Georgina Brown lives on the coast with her mom and younger brother in a small two-bedroom house. Her father walked out when she was three, and that’s when her asthma attacks started.

It’s the summer before her junior year of high school, and Savannah has a job at the local public library.  One day at the beach, with her inhaler at home, Savannah has a severe asthma attack.  She’s rescued by Jackson, a dreamy surfer staying with his cousins for the summer.  He rushes her home, and her breathing eases.  As their relationship develops, the pains of her past and her asthma begin to lessen.  Their romance is cut short when Jackson has to leave to help his family.  With Jackson gone, Savannah must learn to cope with her asthma and the trials of a long term relationship.  This coming-of-age novel also explores family relationships.  Savannah’s mom, a single parent, deals with her only daughter beginning to date and the summer mischief that her 12-year old son creates.

Breathing is Herbsman’s first novel, and is loosely inspired by the vacations Herbsman spent on the North Carolina coast.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Children & Young Adults, Coast, Herbsman, Cheryl Renée, New Hanover, Romance/Relationship

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by | July 14, 2009 · 11:25 am

Cathy Holton. Beach Trip. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009.

On a resort island off the coast of Wilmington, four friends gather to renew the ties they had as college students twenty years earlier. Mel, Sara, Annie, and Lola plan to sunbathe, laugh, and party, but their conversations develop a darker tone.  Each woman has made her share of mistakes, and each lives with some sorrow.  Annie and Mel unload secrets that have burden them since college, but it is Lola who finds a more dramatic way to turn her life around.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Brunswick, Coast, Holton, Cathy, New Hanover

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by | June 17, 2009 · 9:18 am

Linda Howard. To Die For. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

A few years ago Blair Mallory divorced her cheating, wanna-be-politician husband and spent her settlement money on opening a classy gym in Western North Carolina. It was a pretty good existence (if a bit bland), but after she witnesses the murder of one of the gym’s clients in the parking lot, things get a lot more interesting. There is a chance that the killer was actually after her, a possibility that is supported by other threats against her life. The cop in charge of the investigation, a man she dated briefly and is still attracted to, spices up the story. While most of the novel takes place in Blair’s unnamed N.C. hometown, it does take a detour to Wrightsville Beach, where Blair tries to escape from the stress of the murder investigation by embracing her inner beach-bunny.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2005, Coast, Howard, Linda, Mountains, New Hanover, Romance/Relationship, Suspense/Thriller

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by | June 1, 2009 · 3:28 pm

Joanna Catherine Scott. Child of the South. New York: Berkley Books, 2009.

Child of the South continues the story started in The Road from Chapel Hill. The War has ended, but Eugenia, Tom, and Clyde all face substantial hardships. Eugenia travels to Wilmington, where she lives with family and searches for the truth about her past and her mother. She also meets and becomes friends with Abraham Galloway, the former Union spy who is a charismatic leader and one of the new African American state Senators in Raleigh. Back in Chapel Hill, Clyde–who was crippled fighting for the Union–struggles to keep his farm afloat and his family alive. Ironically, the former fugitive-slave hunter is helped in this endeavor by Tom, the ex-slave who was given his freedom by Eugenia and at one point captured by Clyde.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Coast, Historical, New Hanover, Novels in Series, Orange, Piedmont, Scott, Joanna Catherine

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by | May 1, 2009 · 12:26 pm

Thomas Fahy. Night Visions. New York: Dark Alley, 2004.

Frank arrives in San Francisco looking for a missing woman and he convinces his former girlfriend Samantha to help out with the investigation. Samantha, a lawyer suffering from severe insomnia, has just begun an experimental treatment to help her sleep.  After she starts to notice connections between the murders and her sleep clinic, she wonders if she might be the next victim.  The plot with Samantha and Frank takes place in San Francisco, but a series of flashbacks within the story take place in North Carolina locations like Chapel Hill, Durham, and Wilmington.

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2004, Coast, Durham, Fahy, Thomas, Mystery, New Hanover, Orange, Piedmont, Suspense/Thriller