Books

by Mary Beachum

River Jordan
by Augusta Trobaugh

Trobaugh continues her deft insights into the power of friendships to challenge and heal in this novel of lost people who find a way to make a community.

The Witch's Grave
by Phillipe Depoy

Folklorist and reluctant detective Fever Develin returns in a second mystery set in the entrancing beauty of the remnants of traditional Appalachian society.

Firestorm
by Iris Johansen

Atlanta arson investigator Kerry Murphy and her keen-nosed dog Sam track a killer using wit and psychic power in this taut fast-paced thriller.

Judas Island
by Kathryn Wall

Returning home from an interlude with her Parisian lover, Hilton Head sleuth Bay Tanner becomes entangled in a knot of murder and intertwined plot lines.

Hissy Fit
by Mary Kay Andrews

In Andrews's latest novel, social satire meets romance in Madison, Ga.-and descriptions of the antiques get as much care and attention as the characters.

Walking Money
by James Born

Born turns a career in law enforcement into suspense fiction set among the cops and criminals of southern Florida.

'Mater Biscuit:
A Homegrown Novel
by Julie Cannon

When the failing Mama Jewell comes to stay, Imogene, Jeanette and Loutishie continue the adventure of small-town life and the therapy of gardening that they began in True Love and Homegrown Tomatoes.

Suddenly Southern:
A Yankee's Guide To
Living in Dixie
by Maureen Duffin-Ward
Simon & Schuster, 2004

When this venerable reviewer was but a scab-kneed young 'un in the 1950s South, I was called into one of those serious parent-child conversations that all kids dread. A company from Massachusetts had just built a factory in our small town.

I was told that it was very important for me to be hospitable to the new children who would be coming to school, no matter how different they acted or how strange they sounded because our town needed their daddy's factory. We all became good friends, of course, and now the South is home to many refugees from shoveling snow.

Inevitably, a literary genre of explaining the South to its new residents has evolved. Traditionally the authors have been Southerners, native tour guides to its beloved sociological eccentricities. One of the newest versions of that style is We're Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle by Celia Rivenbark (St. Martin's Press).

Now the transplanted Yankees themselves have taken to explaining their adopted region to those who would follow. Maureen Duffin-Ward is a Philadelphian transplanted to Raleigh. She admits that her husband dragged her down South "kicking and screaming." Now she has a few survival tips for her comrades in exile who still sound like "The Nanny," but really do want to know the proper way to pronounce pecan. In Suddenly Southern: A Yankee's Guide To Living in Dixie, she offers a tongue-in-cheek conglomeration of lists, quizzes "Yankee Dos," "Yankee Don'ts" and recipes that will either allow the reader to blend right in or send him running back to Buffalo. She notes that "Y'all come back and see us real soon now" is Southspeak for "This conversation is over." She gives us "ten ways to say now that's ugly in Dixie." She dares us to be tough the first time that palmetto bug drops off the showerhead. And she concludes with "100 Southern things worth the trip," from "#1 crepe myrtles" to #100 Carolina blue skies."

The Osceola
Community Club
by Darlene Eaton
Cumberland House, 2004

Once upon a time, a half-century ago, there was a small north Florida cracker town where one family was rich and the rest just got by on what little they had. Now the farms are covered with developments and Osceola's ramshackle downtown has been spruced up with tea shops and antique stores. With some uncertainty, Cassandra Burquette has returned on a tour bus of shoppers to the physical location where she spent her holidays, hoping to find something of the remembered place still there. Wandering into a used bookstore, she finds a cookbook published by the Osceola Community Club in 1958. In its pages are the names that evoke a fountain of memories of her 12th summer, for each name had a story and each story was a piece of her childhood and of the place that was Osceola.

The book bills itself as a novel, but author Darlene Eaton disregards the literary conventions as blithely as Cassandra's Granny Ellie dismissing a suggestion that her tea was too sweet. There is no particular plot and, although the narrator was 12 during most of the stories, she isn't undergoing any dramatic coming-of-age experience. She was instead a "child who had always lived within hugging distance of relatives who adored her just for the sake of adoring her." She just follows her cousin around, riding bikes down the dusty streets and looking for boys to fall in love with. ...

The real hero of the novel is "the dumpy, dirty little town of Osceola.

Populated by backward descendents of defeated Confederate soldiers." Every person has a story and every story is recounted with humor and tenderness. For a modern urban grownup, there is a longing for that kind of community, as fractious as it could sometimes be, where people are bound together by place and kinship. Reading it provokes the reader to recall her own stories, to fix the recipe for Lazy Gal Brunswick Stew or Seven-Up Congealed Salad and enjoy a hearty helping of nostalgia.

Falling Stars: Air Crashes That
Filled Rock
and Roll Heaven
by Rich Everitt
Harbor House, 2004

The day the music died" is singer Don McLean's famous tribute to the air crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in 1959. It was one of the first of many such untimely deaths of rock and pop stars whose lives and tragic ends are chronicled in Falling Stars. In his foreword, author Rick Everitt says that the book combines his twin passions for flying and music.

On a long flight, he began to wonder about the real stories behind the crashes, the results of the methodical detective work of the NTSB that were not announced until months after the media coverage had moved to another crisis. He began to dig into old files and reports, found his answers and "something more an opportunity to revisit old friends who had provided the soundtrack for our lives."

They are all in this book. The big stars are here: Ricky Nelson, Patsy Cline, Ronnie Van Zant, Jim Croce, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Otis Redding, John Denver and Aaliyah, and often their backups or bands. Everitt also includes a host of lesser-known celebrities from bass guitarist Joe Dan Petty to Japanese rocker Kyu Sakamoto. Each section includes a brief biography, a detailed look at the type of plane involved, a vividly and violently described dramatization of the actual plane crash, and a careful look at the subsequent report of safety officials. Each ends with a section labeled "Oddities and Ironies" chock full of the kinds of tidbits that rock trivia fans love. He tells us, for example, that after Rick Nelson died, his friend Bob Dylan opened his next few concerts with Lonesome Town, or that John Denver was a driving force behind NASA's "Civilians in Space" program. The place he wanted was given to Christie McAuliffe on the ill-fated Challenger flight.

After the sad catalog of shredded metal and severed heads, the reader turns the page hoping for some conclusion that would explain some meaning the author found in his hours of poring through the records. Do these stories of lost lives have a moral or are they just a series of events that happen to be united by a common theme? That work is left to the reader. The information has been presented and the list is complete at least until tomorrow's headlines.