B & T Local 03-29-2004 $25.95.

Thirteen-year-old Angie Sullivan adores her family's new home at Black Creek Crossing, until she discovers that the house had been the scene of a double murder and the focus of a series of increasingly bizarre events.

The dark history and dire secrets of a peaceful small town are summoned from the shadows of the past. Unholy forces are stirred from long slumber to monstrous new life. And two young misfits discover the chilling art of turning persecution into retribution. With these eerie ingredients, bestselling master John Saul once again works his unique brand of sinister magic to conjure an unforgettable tale of unspeakable terror. For most of her young life, thirteen-year-old Angel Sullivan has been on the outside looking in, enduring the taunts of cruel schoolmates and the angry abuse of a bitter father. Then Angel’s family moves to the quaint town of Roundtree, Massachusetts—where a charming home is available, a promising job awaits Angel’s unemployed father, and most of all, the chance to make a new start beckons to the shy, hopeful teenager. But when she is shunned by her new classmates, Angel falls deeper into despair. Until she meets Seth Baker, a fellow outcast—and a fateful kinship is forged. It’s Seth who tells Angel the unspoken truth about the legacy of murder that hangs over her family’s home—and the whispered rumors that something supernatural still dwells there. Uncertain whether the stories are true, and desperate to escape the torment of their daily lives, Angel and Seth devote themselves to contacting whatever restless soul haunts the dark recesses of Black Creek Crossing. But once they have begun, there is no turning back. Guided by an anguished and vengeful spirit, they uncover the shocking events and centuries-old horrors that lay buried beneath the placid veneer of Roundtree. And along with the ghastly revelations comes a terrifying power—one that feeds upon the rage of the victimized, turning the basest impulses and most dangerous desires into devastating weapons. Now, the closer Angel and Seth are pushed toward the edge by their tormentors, the deeper they descend into the maelstrom of dark forces they’ve unleashed . . . and the more unspeakable the hour of reckoning will be.

Award-winning author Tonya Bolden sheds light on an unknown moment of the Civil War to readers in a searing, poetic novel about the dream of freedom.

The Trans-Cedar lynching is an infamous tale buried deep in the subconscious of rural Texas history—although it made front-page headlines in the Dallas Morning News and even in national newspapers from May through November of 1899. This horrifying event is at the center of a compelling novel by author Mark Busby. He has not only researched original documents but has used family oral histories to probe the mysteries that still shroud a lynching that is as horrifying and baffling now as it must have been over a hundred years ago. The "War of Northern Aggression" was still fresh in the memory of those who lived through it; hog-stealing, moonshine, secret meetings, and the lore of the Texas Rangers were part of the fabric of country life, and there were many who refused to believe the war was really over. Against this backdrop, a running feud between the Humphries and the Wilkinsons exploded into a triple murder. When young Jefferson Bowie Adams II is given an assignment for a college course in 1964, President Kennedy has just been assassinated, the movement for civil rights is beginning to stir, and developments in Vietnam barely make the back pages of the newspaper. Setting out to record a story from his family's history, Jeff discovers—sitting in his grandfather's hideout while Pampaw smokes a forbidden cigar--a story that is as mesmerizing as it is shocking: the tale of a triple lynching in Henderson County in the late spring of 1899, an event Pampaw himself witnessed. Even as the scene of the crime is slowly being submerged by the filling of the Cedar Creek Reservoir, Jeff struggles to uncover the truths of what really happened that fateful night in 1899. Through the various recollections of his aging kin, Adams begins to uncover a web of relationships and a love story that ultimately leads him to a missing girl, a country graveyard, and a realization that he and his family are part and parcel of the stained history of the South.

Drawing from interviews with people who knew both writers, as well as letters between them and other documented evidence of their meetings, Lillios (English, U. of Central Florida) offers an intriguing and in-depth study of the friendship between writers Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She describes their complicated interracial friendship during the 1940s, when both were at the height of their fame and creativity and had published successful memoirs--Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road and Rawlings' Cross Creek--following their novels Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Yearling, respectively. Focusing on the year 1942, when the two met, she describes the development of their friendship, the development of their writing craft that culminated in their masterpieces, their memoirs, and how they influenced each other as they struggled to complete their last creative works.

A shocking tale of violence and vengeance in the hills of Wyoming. From Spur Award-winning author Charles G. West . . . FIRST COMES BLOOD Cole Bonner will never forget what happened to his family at Crow Creek Crossing. His wife, her parents, and their three young children—brutally slaughtered by outlaws. The horror of the massacre drove him into the wilderness. Drove him nearly mad. And drove him to seek an equally brutal revenge . . . THEN COMES CARNAGE Now, against his better judgment, Bonner is returning to the place that almost destroyed him. While hunting in the mountains, he discovers that a man has been murdered and a woman abducted. He manages to track the killers and free her. But to bring the widow to safety, he will have to face his own demons. Return to his old homestead. And relive the violence—and the vengeance—of another massacre at Crow Creek Crossing . . . “Rarely has an author painted the great American West in strokes so bold, vivid, and true.” —Ralph Compton