Search - If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy O

Sharyn McCrumb is an aware winning southern author. The below is from her web site:

"She is best known for her Appalachian "Ballad" novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including New York Times Best Sellers She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket, which deal with the issue of the vanishing wilderness, and The Ballad of Frankie Silver, the story of the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina; and The Songcatcher, a genealogy in music, tracing the author's family from 18th century Scotland to the present by following a Scots Ballad through the generations. Ghost Riders, an account of the Civil War in the mountains of western North Carolina, won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature given by the East Tennessee Historical Society."

These are excellent books, I have read most of them.

Another story from the perspective of the local sheriff's department in Hamelin, TN. A country singer moves to this town, and she begins to receive threatening postcards. Parallel stories involve one of the sheriff deputies. Good descriptions of the countryside. Good writing--engaging--made me want to keep reading to see how the story would turn out.

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood keeps the peace in his small Tennessee town most of the time. Every once in a while, though, something goes wrong. When 1960's folksinger Peggy Muryan moves to town seeking solitude and a career comeback, she receives a postcard with a threatening messge and her idyll is shattered. Then a local girl who looks like Peggy vanishes without a trace. Although she was once famous, Peggy has no fondness for the old times. Those days are best left forgotten for Spencer Arrowood, too. But sometimes the past can't rest, and those who try to forget it are doomed to relive it.

One of the Ballad series. Love it! fast read.

A once famous folk singer arrives in the tiny mountain town of Hamlin, Tennessee, and is soon being stalked by what appears to be her former singing partner, left behind when she made it big and supposedly killed in Viet Name. Good read.

On e of my favorite mystery writers