The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter [Hardcover]

Sharyn McCrumb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1992

Summoned to the scene of a ghastly crime in her remote Appalachian village, Laura Bruce, the new minister's wife, realizes that Sunday school teacher Nora Crumb's dark visions have come true.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Revisiting some of the characters from If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, Edgar Award winner McCrumb weaves Appalachian folklore and death, in natural and unnatural forms, into a story that meanders like a mountain stream through the hills of east Tennessee before rushing to its turbulent conclusion. Wake County Sheriff Spencer Arrowood asks Laura Bruce, wife of the local Baptist minister, who is now an Army chaplain stationed overseas, to comfort the bereaved at the scene of a bloody murder. Ret. Maj. Paul Underhill, his wife and two of his four children are dead, shot apparently by one of the sons, who took his own life after killing the others. Laura serves as advocate for the surviving children, Maggie and Mark, who want to remain in the house so they can continue going to classes at the local high school. But when deputy Joe LeDonne discovers that the two have disinterred their father's body from its grave, he wants to know what really happened on the night of the shooting. Concurrently, 38-year-old Laura is told she is pregnant and local farmer Tavy Annis is diagnosed with cancer, brought on by a chemical spill in the Little Dove River. These plots twine around the knowledge of an old mountain seer whose gift adds to the haunting quality of the story and to its chilling suspense. Mystery Guild selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Here, McCrumb turns serious as she explores death from many angles: the matter-of-factness of a backwoodswoman with the gift of Sight; the get-even attitude of two old friends, one dying from the willful contamination of the Little Dover River by the Titan Paper Company; the emotional trauma paralyzing a brother and sister (who were subjects of physical abuse and witnesses to a family bloodbath and suicide); and the despair of a three-year-old who loses his mother, and of a pregnant woman who loses her unborn child. The story unfolds through the vision of Nora Bonesteel, whose Sight sets her to sewing a funeral quilt with six graves on it, and the ministrations of Dark Hollow, Tennessee, preacher's wife Laura Bruce, who is trying to tend to her husband's flock while he's serving in the Gulf. Four of the tombstones are soon co-opted by the Underhills--mother/father/two sons--and while Sheriff Arrowood tries to understand why son Joshua killed his kin and himself, two old friends hold the paper company's CEO hostage for carcinogenic polluting (another grave), and a trailer fire (another tombstone) fills out the quilt, while Laura, grieving for her unborn child, completes the dying cycle. Compelling, in the manner of a folk tale, despite the rather limp prose. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; No Edition Stated edition (April 2, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684194074
• ISBN-13: 978-0684194073
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #979,308 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am an award-winning Southern writer. I am probably best known for my
Appalachian "Ballad" novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains. These books include 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; The Songcatcher, a genealogy in music; and Ghost Riders, an account of the Civil War in the Appalachians.

My newest novel St. Dale, the Canterbury Tales set in NASCAR, was published by Kensington Books of New York in 2005, and is currently a nominee for the Library of Virginia Literary Award in Fiction and a finalist for its People's Choice Award.

Honors include: the 2003 Award for Literature given by the
East Tennessee Historical Society; AWA Outstanding Contribution to
Appalachian Literature Award; Chaffin Award for Achievement in Southern
Literature; Plattner Award for Short Story; and AWA's Best Appalachian
Novel.

I was the first writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee. In 2001 I
served as fiction writer-in-residence at the WICE Conference in Paris, and
in 2005 I was honored as the writer of the year at the annual literary
celebration at Emory and Henry College. (And I was the first Southern writer to take along a NASCAR driver to that literary seminar. Thank you, Ward Burton!)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing page-turner with heart, August 14, 2000

By 

Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (Onyx) (Paperback)

Sharyn McCrumb has now written several books of regional mystery fiction set in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Of these "ballad mysteries," this is one of the very best. It involves several interwoven stories of tragedy, death, and the tenacity of the human spirit. In writing *The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter*, McCrumb has shown herself to be a skilled storyteller indeed, able to keep the several threads of plot moving simultaneously without confusing the reader nor compromising the nuances of the various tales she tells.

Along the way, she successfully conveys to readers her convictions regarding some sad realities of Appalachian life: the isolation, the poverty, the damage to health and environment caused by industrial pollution, and the all-too-familiar spectre of tragedy and death that stalk this ever-struggling region. At the same time, she celebrates the beauty of the mountains and shows that the pride and dignity of its people are something to be cherished and admired.

Yes, the prose itself is perhaps too simple, direct, and unadorned for this to be considered a truly serious work of literature, and some of the elements of "mystery" were not hard to figure out well in advance of their being revealed. However, I enjoyed every page of this novel, and it will definitely inspire me to read more of McCrumb's Appalachian writings.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful!, May 12, 2003

By 

"turtlechick" (Shawsville, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (Onyx) (Paperback)

Nora Bonesteel, the wise woman of the Tennessee mountains is what her Celtic forebears would recognize as an "edge witch", one who patrols the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, the supernatural and the mundane. In this novel sorrow comes to the mountain community in the guise of an murder/suicide on a remote farm and via a polluted river that brings death into the valley. Nora Bonesteel, with her graveyard quilt and her herbal remedies does what she can do to protect the ordinary folk from tragedy. This is a wonderful novel to trace the continuance of Celtic heritage and folkways into America's Eastern mountains which were settled by Britain's Highlanders.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great find!, April 29, 2003

By 

Theresa W (mi, usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (Onyx) (Paperback)

I read the first book in this series, Pretty Peggy-O and read this one right after. This book still seemed to have the author finding her way as a writer, but it was better than the first. And that's not to say I didn't like the first, I did. I liked this one better, but I think it still earns a 4. I am on to the next books in the series and I'm really excited, I think McCrumb has great potential as a writer. She creates stories and characters that you just seem to become wrapped up in. This is definitely a good susepense story.