Monthly Archives: September 2012

James Bailey. The Greatest Show on Dirt. United States: Publisher unknown, 2012.

The main character in this novel, Lane Hamilton, is a twenty-something escapee from corporate banking.  A high school buddy, Rich, gets Lane a job with the Durham Bulls.  Rich is a bit of a bad boy, and while he shows Lane the ins-and-outs of his new job, he also clues in Lane about the fun to be had at the ballpark.  Readers are introduced to the world of minor league baseball: the stat sheets that are prepared for reporters who cover games, the difficult job of removing the tarp that protects the infield, grooming the pitcher’s mound, who hangs out with whom after the games.  A series of clubhouse thefts add an element of mystery to the novel, but the focus is on Lane–how he balances fun with work, extricates himself from one romance and finds another, learns to work with a variety of people, and figures out what success means for him.  James Bailey has written a book that is rich with insider information on the day-to-day operations of minor league baseball and the quirks and concerns of players and other ballpark employees. Readers who attended games at the Durham Athletic Park, or who lived in Durham before 2000, will particularly enjoy the details and local color that enrich this book.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Bailey, James, Durham, Piedmont

Lisa Williams Kline. Wild Horse Spring. Grand Rapids, MI: Zonderkidz, 2012.

Fourteen-year old stepsisters Stephanie and Diana bonded last summer, despite having two very different personalities and struggling with their parents’ new marriages. Socially adept but squeamish Stephanie learned to be braver and to take risks during a family vacation at a ranch in the mountains, and outdoorsy but awkward Diana finally reached out to her new sister. But now a whole year has gone by, the first one in which both girls attend the same school. Diana still doesn’t fit in and gets made fun of, while for Stephanie making new friends is effortless. Diana is jealous and hurt and pulls back from their budding relationship.

Stephanie doesn’t understand what makes Diana tick. She’s been sweet and kind to her, just as she is to everyone. But Diana refuses to let her in, retreating into her passion for horses and other animals. Stephanie’s problems don’t stop with Diana: she lives primarily with her mother and her mother’s new husband, along with his 18-year-old son Max. Max calls Stephanie names and drinks behind their parents’ backs. Stephanie yearns to live with her dad Norm and Diana’s mom Lynn, but she’s afraid to ask. When Norm, Lynn, Stephanie, and Diana all go to a beach rental on the Outer Banks for the girls’ spring break, Stephanie hopes she can work up the courage to tell her father what she really thinks, even if it means making things difficult for the adults.

But if Stephanie is considering causing problems, Diana can be counted on to stir up trouble. This time it’s the wild horses that roam Currituck’s beaches: Diana becomes obsessed with them, and keeps running off to find the herds. When she discovers a hurt mare hit by a vehicle, nothing will satisfy her but to find the perpetrator, and Stephanie is once more party to her stepsister’s determination. Will the two be able to overcome the new obstacles in their relationship and find out who injured the horse?

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Children & Young Adults, Coast, Currituck, Kline, Lisa Williams, Novels in Series

Terry Roberts. A Short Time to Stay Here. Banner Elk, NC: Ingalls Publishing Group, 2012.

Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in 1917 wasn’t the “rural, undeveloped South” of northern newspaper articles; it was a land far beyond. It was a place of the steepest mountains, the wildest river gorges, the meanest lives, and the shortest winter rations in the country. It was deep, hard, lonesome, and –if you weren’t starving to death–beautiful.  

Stephen Robbins has been running the glamorous Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs, North Carolina for seven years. An insomniac, alcoholic widower, Stephen is devoted to his hotel and the people who work with him, confessing that he feels physically one with the elegant architecture. But Stephen’s life is about to change radically. World War I finds its way to the Mountain Park Hotel in the form of 2,000 German nationals, trapped in the United States after the declaration of war. Forced to turn the hotel into an internment camp, Stephen thinks he has more than he can handle. Not only is he expected to babysit 2,000 Germans, but he also has to keep the increasingly bloodthirsty townsfolk of Hot Springs from violence, especially his violent cousin Roy, who just happens to be the Sheriff. Sheriff Roy Robbins has no reason to love Stephen– thanks to a terrible mistake, Stephen shot and killed Roy’s brother a few years back. Roy is biding his time for revenge, and Stephen knows it.

Then Anna Ulmann, New York photographer, steps into the impending catastrophe. Fleeing a domineering husband in the North, she has also come south with a very real desire to photograph the internees in their prison. Stephen is by turns annoyed and attracted to the beautiful Anna, but he can’t help falling in love with her. Together, the two stand against escapees, typhoid, bodies arriving from the European front, and society’s own mandates against a married woman falling in love with a man who is not her husband. With blood feuds and angry husbands lying in wait, will Anna and Stephen survive the coming storm?

Written in descriptive, intelligent prose, this debut novel is a moving tale of finding love and empathy in a time of conflict, and what it means to be a prisoner in spirit, even if the body is free.

A Short Time to Stay Here was the winner of the 2013 Sir Walter Raleigh Award.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Historical, Madison, Mountains, Roberts, Terry, Romance/Relationship

Lisa Williams Kline. Summer of the Wolves. Grand Rapids, MI: Zonderkidz, 2012.

Stephanie and Diana are like night and day: blonde Diana loves the outdoors, and gets along with animals better than people. Dark-haired Stephanie is artsy, social, and fashionable. Each regards the other’s world as alien to her own. Unfortunately, Stephanie’s dad and Diana’s mom have just gotten married, and the two new stepsisters are pushed into a “family” vacation at a ranch in the North Carolina mountains. Stephanie is horrified that she’ll be expected to participate in activities like trail riding and white-water rafting, while Diana is angry that she’ll be held back by her stepsister’s reluctance. Stephanie actually wants to be friends, but Diana is so angry that civil interaction is barely possible.

With the family shift weighing down on both of them, the vacation does not start well for the girls. Stephanie nearly falls off a horse, and Diana is even more annoyed when her socially skilled stepsister starts making friends with other children right away. But then Diana discovers the wolves: two part-wolf, part-dog hybrids that a local man keeps for show. Diana’s heart goes out immediately to the skinny, frightened creatures, who are kept in a small pen with little food or water. She determines to free them, and when Stephanie catches wind of her plan, the usually cautious brunette decides to help Diana. Together they free the wolves, but their actions have far-reaching consequences that they didn’t consider. The girls must help those who wish to bring the wolves safely home, realizing along the way that they’re more similar than they thought.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Children & Young Adults, Kline, Lisa Williams, Mountains, Novels Set in Fictional Places

Casey Mayes. A Killer Column. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2011.

Derrick Duncan, the demanding syndicator of Savannah Stone’s newspaper puzzles, has just been found stabbed with a steak knife in a luxury Raleigh hotel. This would be cause for celebration if only Savannah had not be the one who discovered his body. The fact that only moments before his death she had slapped him across the face – in front of his executive assistant, Kelsey – for firing her does not help her situation. Luckily for Savannah, many people were delighted to see him go, so there are lots of suspects. Plus, she has her husband Zach, the former Charlotte chief of police, and Jenny Blake, her college roommate and a top lawyer, to help draw attention to other people who may have been left disgruntled by Derrick’s behavior. Savannah visits many City of Oaks landmarks as she uses her logic, matched with Zach and Jenny’s professional expertise, to solve the crime and to keep her job.

A Killer Column is the second novel in the “Mystery by the Numbers” series.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2011, Mayes, Casey, Mystery, Novels in Series, Piedmont, Wake

Ann Tatlock. Traveler’s Rest. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 2012.

There is an old adage about letting going of what you love: if it returns it was yours all along, if it doesn’t it never was. But what if you are the one who was let go, and you never wanted to be in the first place?

Jane Marrow finds herself in that heartbreaking situation when her fiance, Seth Ballantine, returns from Iraq a quadriplegic. He loves her, but Seth is unwilling to let Jane forfeit a “normal life”: to be carried over the threshold by her husband, to become a mother, and to be free of full-time care giving responsibilities.  He worries that she will waste her life away with him and will eventually resent him if they go through with the wedding. For her part, Jane is unwavering: she is resolved to never leave Seth or to give up on their plans, even though practically everyone has given her an “out”. Seth finally explains that her insistence on staying together is hampering his recovery, so she gives him some space.

At the Veterans Affairs hospital in Asheville, Jane meets a variety of people who support her and Seth in this difficult time. Two Ugandan cousins serve as aids in the hospital, and they always lighten the mood. A retired doctor with an uncomfortable past, Truman Rockaway, helps Jane understand forgiveness and faith. And Jon-Paul Pearcy is a volunteer musician at the VA who shows Jane and Seth that it is possible to live a full life with a disability. Along the way, Jane learns about love, trusting God, and letting go.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Buncombe, Mountains, Religious/Inspirational, Tatlock, Ann

Brenda Tetreault. The Witcher Legacy. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2009.

After a childhood spent moving all over the country with her restless mother, Melissa Witcher inherits her family’s ancestral home in Bounty Cove, North Carolina.  In Bounty Cove, she finds many things she yearns for: a chance for a relationship with the father she never knew and an immediate attraction to the handsome Michael Kemper, a local contractor who has been taking care of the abandoned Witcher house. But not everything is perfect.

Michael has just recently broken off his engagement to the two-timing Jessica, and he doesn’t want to rush into a serious relationship. Both he and Melissa are frustrated by taking things so slowly, but Michael insists. His last relationship ended so poorly because it was based on physical attraction and not true love, and something about Melissa is so special that he can’t afford to ruin what they might have. But while Melissa and Michael work on their budding romance, evil is afoot. The Witcher family has a dark history of murder, madness, and abuse, and restless spirits still linger around the venerable homestead. In addition to winning over the reluctant Michael, Melissa is determined to exhume her family’s ghosts, but this might prove more difficult (and dangerous) than she thinks. Strange phenomena have always been a part of the house: sometimes malevolent, sometimes beneficial. Will Melissa and Michael survive long enough to build a new future for the Witcher name?

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

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Coast, Horror, Novels in Series, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Romance/Relationship, Tetreault, Brenda

Joseph L. S. Terrell. Tide of Darkness. Rock Hill, SC: Bella Rosa Books, 2010.

Harrison Weaver is a writer whose stories have been published in a  number of true crime magazines.  But Weaver is tired of murder and the lowlifes and psychos he meets in his work, so he’s getting away from it all by renting a house on the Outer Banks. Unfortunately for Weaver, he arrives in Manteo just as the body of Sally Jean Pearson is found.  Sally was a college student, in Manteo for the summer working as a stage hand and extra in The Lost Colony production.

Sally’s murder is eerily similar to the murder of another Lost Colony actress four years earlier.  Weaver wrote about that murder, making both friends and enemies in the process. Manteo has changed little in the past four years, and soon the investigative team that worked on the first murder is together again to work on the Pearson case.  Weaver’s buddy, SBI Agent Thomas Twiddy, is back, but so is Rick Schweikert, the county prosecutor who has it out for Weaver.  Schweikert and some other locals think it’s just too much of a coincidence that Weaver arrived in town the day Pearson’s body was found–could it be that the crime writer knows something the local police don’t?  When a sheriff’s deputy leads people to think that Twiddy and Weaver are about to break both cases open, Weaver finds himself in danger.  But before long it’s clear that the killer feels backed into a corner and that Weaver is not the only one whose life is in danger as this novel moves to a dramatic conclusion.

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

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Filed under 2010, 2010-2019, Coast, Dare, Mystery, Novels in Series, Terrell, Joseph L. S.

Wendy L. Young. Come the Shadows. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2011.

Campbell Creek, North Carolina is the epitome of a sleepy small town. Officer Will Harmon, now in his forties, hasn’t seen much action over his near-twenty year career on the police force. His day usually consists of eating at the local diner and center of the community, the Pie Shop, and chasing after young teenage ne’er-do-wells as they think up new pranks. But one morning all that changes when Campbell Creek has its first murder in seventeen years. A group of kids discovers a pile of bones in an abandoned factory, and no one seems to know to whom they could belong.

Soon Will is caught up in the investigation, bringing a young rookie cop named Ricky along for the ride. But this rabbit-hole goes much deeper than it appears on the surface. Is the murder connected with all the new housing developments going up in the quiet town? Will’s wife Laura is busy protesting the high-handed way developers are dealing with the Campbell Creek community, and soon she’s receiving threatening responses to her activism. Can Will, Ricky, and Laura find the wrongdoers before it’s too late for them, and for Campbell Creek? Find out in the first book in the Campbell Creek Mysteries.

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

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2011, Mystery, Novels in Series, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont, Young, Wendy L.