The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

"Ms. McCrumb writes with quiet fire and maybe a little mountain magic. .

. . She plucks the mysteries from people's lives and works these dark narrative threads into Appalachian legends older than the hills.

Like every true storyteller, she has the Sight."The New York Times Book Review In 1935, a beautiful young schoolteacher is accused of murdering her coal-miner father in a Virginia mountain community. National journalists descend on Wise County, intent upon exonerating the defendant, and on stereotyping the mountain community to satisfy their Depression-era readers. But local cub reporter Carl Jennings writes what he sees an ordinary town and a defendant who is probably guilty.

The novel resonates with the present an economic depression; a deadly Japanese earthquake; the rise of political fanatics; and a media culture turning news stories into soap operas for the diversion of the masses. A literary tour de force, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers continues the Ballard saga by examining social issues that go well beyond the fate of one defendant. It is a testament to Sharyn McCrumb's lyrical and poetic writing about the mountain South.

McCrumb is the author of The Ballad of Frankie Silver, She Walks These Hills, and many other award-winning novels. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She was named a "Virginia Woman of History" for achievement in literature in 2008.

She lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than a hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790 in the Smoky Mountains that divide North Carolina and Tennessee.