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Summary
Summary
In 1934 all the national publications sent their star reporters to remote Virginia to cover the trial of Erma Morton, a beautiful 21-year-old mountain girl with a teaching degree accused of murdering her father, a drunken tyrant of a man. Instead of rundown shacks and horse-drawn buggies, the journalists found gas stations and coal company executives, but the truth can always be manipulated to suit the audience.
Summary
In 1935, when Erma Morton, a beautiful young woman with a teaching degree, is charged with the murder of her father in a remote Virginia mountain community, the case becomes a cause célèbre for the national press.Eager for a case to replace the Lindbergh trial in the public's imagination, the journalists descend on the mountain county intent on infusing their stories with quaint local color: horse-drawn buggies, rundown shacks, children in threadbare clothes. They need tales of rural poverty to give their Depression-era readers people whom they can feel superior to. The untruth of these cultural stereotypes did not deter the big-city reporters, but a local journalist, Carl Jennings, fresh out of college and covering his first major story, reports what he sees: an ordinary town and a defendant who is probably guilty. This journey to a distant time and place summons up ghosts from the reporters' pasts: Henry Jernigan's sojourn in Japan that ended in tragedy, Shade Baker's hardscrabble childhood on the Iowa prairie, and Rose Hanelon's brittle sophistication, a shield for her hopeless love affair. While they spin their manufactured tales of squalor, Carl tries to discover the truth in the Morton trial with the help of his young cousin Nora, who has the Sight. But who will believe a local cub reporter whose stories contradict the nation's star journalists? For the listener, the novel resonates with the present: an economic depression, a deadly flu epidemic, a world contending with the rise of political fanatics, and a media culture determined to turn news stories into soap operas for the diversion of the masses.
Author Notes
Sharyn McCrumb was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on February 26, 1948. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech. Her novels include the Elizabeth MacPherson series and the Ballad series. St. Dale won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award and the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Sherwood Anderson Short Story Award, the Perry F. Kendig Award for Achievement in Literary Arts, the Chaffin Award for Southern Literature, and the Plattner Award for Short Story. In 2014, she received the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina's Chowan University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1935, the case of an Appalachian schoolteacher arrested for murdering her father becomes a national news story, seized on by the press for its sensationalism and the opportunity to mock the rural inhabitants involved. Competing with a brigade of city journalists is novice Tennessee newspaperman Carl Jenkins, whose obsession with the truth leads him to call in his cousin Nora, gifted with second sight-but what, exactly, can he report with no concrete evidence? The latest in McCrumb's Appalachian Ballad series (after 2003's Ghost Riders) is decidedly mixed; McCrumb's grasp of setting and character instantly immerses readers in the worlds of both the sympathetic locals and the cynical city press. Her plot, part mystery and part cautionary tale, is passable, but leaves nothing for readers to work out on their own. Dialogue, which stretches for authentic, often feels awkward and stilted; though fans will be familiar with the style, new readers will likely be frustrated. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In the isolated mountains of southwestern Virginia, a young woman is jailed for the murder of her father. The fact that she is beautiful and college-educated, while he is poor and violent, piques the curiosity of the national press, still basking in the success of their sensational coverage of the Lindbergh trial. Pompous newsman Henry Jernigan and his sob-sister cohort, Rose Hanelon, descend upon the backwoods hamlet of Wise with preconceived notions about everything from the attire and demeanor of its occupants to the motive and guilt of the accused. While they paint a colorful, if woefully inaccurate, picture for their readers, cub reporter Carl Jenkins, a mountain boy himself, still naively clings to ideals of journalistic objectivity. Yet he hedges his bets when he has his cousin, Nora Bonesteel, a young woman gifted with the Sight, meet the accused. Intent on protesting contemporary excesses of media manipulation, McCrumb, alas, bludgeons her point to death, to the detriment of the setting and characters that have made her Ballad series so beloved. Loyal fans have been eagerly awaiting a new installment, so expect high demand. Discerning readers, however, will be sorely disappointed.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Washington political thrillers are, for he most part, born to be boring. The hero is usually some high-minded lawyer who's become disillusioned after placing his trust in a corrupt government official who happens to be a blood relative. Either that or he's some high-minded former spy who jeopardizes life and pension by coming out of retirement to get mixed up in a preposterous plot involving assassins from unpronounceable nations. The nice thing about Mike Lawson's Washington thrillers is that nobody is high-minded. Certainly not John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, speaker of the House ("and God help the country") and as unscrupulous a politician as you'd hope to find outside a federal prison cell. Nor could you pin that high-and-holy tag on Mahoney's go-to guy, Joe DeMarco, who holes up in a subbasement office of the Capitol building and surfaces only when the speaker has some dirty business that needs to be done. In HOUSE JUSTICE (Atlantic Monthly, $24), Mahoney locks egos with Jacob LaFountaine, the director of the C.I.A., who is apoplectic because someone in government leaked information to a reporter, Sandra Whitmore, that resulted in the execution of a valued undercover agent in Iran. Mahoney has a pretty good idea who tipped the intelligence to Whitmore, who has cheerfully gone to jail to protect her source (and advance her career). But since Mahoney doesn't want it known that he once had an affair with her, there's nothing he can do about this mess - except call for DeMarco to bring his bucket and clean it up. And because Lawson delights in inverting even the most banal of genre conventions, he makes sure that a clandestine meeting between the two men takes place not in a dark bar, but at a kids' ballgame. Once some Russian gangsters muscle into the story, the book meets its own quota for preposterous plot developments. But Lawson's homegrown characters - the ones plucked from that busy intersection inside the Beltway where politics, journalism and big money meet to do business - are so flamboyantly and unapologetically corrupt that no matter what they do, they do it with a certain integrity. When Mahoney looks to a photo of Tip O'Neill for inspiration on how to force a congressman out of office, he's only being true to himself. After a swift run of Nascar novels, Sharyn McCrumb recovers her balladeer voice in THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $24.99). While continuing the storytelling tradition of her previous books set in the Southern Appalachians, this new novel jumps back in time to the Depression, when the nation was in the right mood for a sad tale. Erma Morton's story is sad enough, with its lurid details about a young teacher on trial for killing her father - but just wait until the big-city journalists get their hands on it. By the time these snooty visitors have filed their condescending articles about this "hillbilly" coal-mining country, no one would recognize the region's civilized towns and solid citizens. While the plot is too skimpy and the nasty journalists too schematically drawn to sustain this ballad through its last note, the old families who live in proud seclusion up in these hills produce a number of wise souls whose voices are pure poetry. Sorry to rain on the parade of popular authors coming out of Scandinavia, but Swedish citizenship does not automatically confer literary talent on a writer, not even one as widely read as Camilla Lackberg. THE ICE PRINCESS (Pegasus, $25.95), the first of this author's seven crime novels set in the coastal town of Fjallbacka, opens well, with an insider's view of the corrosive forces at work on a small fishing village that is losing its identity as it transforms itself into a tourist resort. But that vision is lost once the focus shifts to the insipid heroine, Erica Falck, a struggling writer who returns home to find that a beloved childhood friend has been murdered. Erica finds plenty of material for a true-crime book ("quite a new phenomenon" in Sweden) once she unearths the shameful secrets harbored by tight-lipped residents of this inbred community. But if her book turns out to be anything like Lackberg's overblown potboiler, with its simplistic characters and stilted language (in Steven T. Murray's cotton-mouthed translation), Sweden's stellar literary reputation might be in trouble. Don't we dearly love bad girls? Hailey Cain, the protagonist of Jodi Compton's HAILEY'S WAR (Shaye Areheart, $22.99), is as tough as the Bates Enforcers ("heavy-soled black lace-ups with a side zip") she wears as a bike messenger in San Francisco. With her conscience in free fall and the law at her back, Hailey hooks up with a friend in a Latina gang and agrees to escort a young Mexican girl across the border and into the mountains of Chihuahua. For all the hairpin turns she takes on this adventure, Hailey proves herself to be a regular straight arrow. Charlie Fox came on strong in Zoë Sharp's early novels but, like a lot of tough girls, softened up with time. Now, thanks to an enterprising small press, we can catch Charlie in the rough. Originally published in 2001, KILLER INSTINCT (Busted Flush, paper, $15) finds this army-trained martial-arts expert on her first job, working security for a club in an English seaside town. Charlie looks like a made-for-TV model, with her red hair and motorcycle leathers, but Sharp means business. The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie's skills are both formidable and for real. In Mike Lawson's thriller, the speaker of the House needs to hide an affair he once had with a reporter.
Excerpts
Excerpts
ONE NARROW ROAD TO A FAR PROVINCE Each day is a journey, and the journey itself home. --MATSUO BASH? Two hours west of Washington, Henry Jernigan finally gave up on his book. This Mr. John Fox, Jr., might have been a brilliant author--although personally he doubted it--but the clattering of the train shook the page so much that he found himself reading the same tiresome line over and over until his head began to ache. The November chill seemed to seep through the sides of the railroad car, and even in his leather gloves and overcoat, he did not feel warm. He thought of taking a fortifying nip of brandy from the silver flask secreted in his coat pocket, but he was afraid of depleting his supply, when he was by no means sure that he could obtain another bottle in the benighted place that was his destination. Prohibition had been repealed eighteen months ago, but he had heard that some of these backwoods places still banned liquor by local ordinance. He repressed a shudder. Imagine trying to live in such a place, sober. A man lay dead in some one-horse town in the mountains of southwest Virginia. Well, what of it? The only thing that made death interesting was the details. In point of fact, the death of a stranger no longer interested Henry Jernigan at all. In all his years on the job he had seen too many permutations of death to take much of an interest anymore, but even if the emotion was lacking, the skill to recount it was still there in force. Jernigan would supply the telling particulars of the story; his readers could furnish the tears. All that really mattered to him these days was a decent dinner, a clean and quiet place to sleep, and a flask of spirits to insulate him from the tedium of it all. He brushed a speck of cigar ash from the sleeve of his black wool coat. Henry Jernigan may have been sent to the back of beyond by an unfeeling philistine editor, but by god that didn't mean he had to go there looking like a yokel. True, his starched linen shirt was sweaty and rumpled from the vicissitudes of a crowded winter train ride, and his shoes, hand-stitched leather from a cobbler in Baltimore, glistened with mud and coal grit, but he fancied that the essential worth of his wardrobe, and thus of himself, would shine through the shabbiness of the suit and the dust of the road. Henry Jernigan was a gentleman. A gentleman of the press, perhaps, but still a gentleman. He looked without favor at the book in his lap, and with a sigh he closed it, marking his place only because he was reading Fox's novel for research, not for plea sure. After sixty interminable pages he had begun to think of the book as "The Trail of the Loathsome Pine," a quip he planned to spring on his colleagues as soon as he met up with them. At last winter's trial in New Jersey, clever but ugly Rose Hanelon had made a similar play on words with a Gene Stratton Porter title. When the family governess had committed suicide, Rose took to referring to her as the "Girl of the Lindbergh-Lost." No doubt Rose was on her way here, as well. He thought of going to look for her on his way to the dining car when it was closer to dinnertime. At least one need not lack for civilized conversation, even in the hinterlands. He knew all the big wheels on the major papers, of course. The places changed, but the faces and the greasy diner food stayed the same, no matter where they went. He didn't see those smug jackals from the New York Journal American, though. That was odd. The word was that the Hearst syndicate had paid for an exclusive on this trial, so he had expected to see their people. Either they had already arrived, or they had what they needed and went home, relying on local stringers to send them the facts of the trial. Henry's paper seemed ready to fight them for dominance of the story, though. They had even assigned one of the World Tele gram photographers to accompany him to this godforsaken place. Rose Hanelon of the Herald Tribune would be here, though. Henry was fond of Rose. While technically she was a competitor, they got along well, and he flattered himself that his serious readers and the sentimental followers of her sob sister columns were worlds apart, so that, in fact, no rivalry existed. He even looked the other way when Rose slipped Shade Baker a few bucks to take photos for her, too. The brotherhood of the Fourth Estate: it was as close to a family as Henry had these days. He went back to thinking up clever epigrams to entertain Shade and Rose at dinner. They never printed their heartless little jests, of course. Mustn't disillusion their readers, who saw them as omnipotent and benevolent deities meddling in the affairs of mortals. At least, Henry liked to think his readers imagined him in such an exalted position, if only for a few fleeting hours before they wrapped the potato peels in his newspaper column, or set it down on the kitchen floor for the new puppy. Sic transit gloria mundi. The train clattered on, and he stared out at the barren fields edged by a forest of skeletal trees. In just such a landscape, the broken body of a child had been unearthed. Now that had been a story. A golden-haired baby kidnapped . . . Father a dashing pi lot, who gained worldwide celebrity as the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic . . . Mother an ambassador's daughter . . . Frantic searches . . . Ransom demands, and then all hopes dashed when the child's remains were found in nearby woods in a shallow grave . . . that story had everything. Wealth, culture, celebrity, tragedy, and since it had all happened in New Jersey, a comfortable distance from Washington and New York, the reporters had been able to make excursions back to the city. That had been the perfect assignment. All of them thought so. A case that transfixed the world, enough drama and glamour to sell a year's worth of newspapers, all set in a civilized locale convenient for the national press. And for a grand finale: the execution of the guilty man, a foreigner--a detested German--who had been caught with the ransom money hidden in his garage. If they had invented the tale out of whole cloth, they couldn't have done better. In this case they wouldn't be so lucky. This time a backwoods coal miner had got his head bashed in, and because the culprit--or the defendant, anyhow--was a beautiful, educated girl, the newspaper editors thought that Mr. and Mrs. America would eat it up. Provided, of course, it was served to them in a palatable stew of sex, drama, and exotic local color. Henry Jernigan was just the chef to concoct this tasty dish. He directed his gaze out the window, hoping to soothe the pain in his temples with the calming effect of the austere view: more brown, empty fields, bare hillsides of leafless trees, and beyond that the distant haze of blue mountains, indistinguishable from the lowlying clouds at the horizon. In the stubbled ruin of a cornfield, he saw a ragged scarecrow swaying in the wind, which summoned to mind a favorite verse from the Japanese poet Bash?: "A weathered skeleton in windswept fields of memory . . ." He looked around at his fellow passengers, bundled up in drab clothes, sleeping or staring off into space. Surely he was the only person present conversant with the works of Bash?. Yes, once Henry Jernigan had possessed a soul above the cheap pratings of a tabloid newspaper, and in his cups he still could quote from memory the masters of literature from Li Po to Cervantes. But what good had it done him? Scarecrows in dead land. The chiaroscuro vista sweeping past him only succeeded in further quelling his spirits. Jernigan hoped he liked the countryside as much as the next man, but as a city-dweller born and bred, he preferred nature in cultivated moderation: a nice arboretum, for example. This temperate jungle spread out before him, tangled underbrush and dense forest, hedged by dark, forbidding mountains, simply reinforced his belief that he was leaving civilization. At least, he was leaving single malt scotch and the Paris-trained chefs of Manhattan's restaurants, which amounted to the same thing. It was the fault of Mr. John Fox, Jr., that he was on this journey in the first place--all the more reason to loathe the man's book. Still, he would persevere, hoping that if he kept reading, the text might provide him with a few wisps of atmosphere to spice up the story he would have to write. The book, first published in 1908 and popular again now only because of the film currently being made of it, took place in the 1890s, but surely nothing had changed around here in the ensuing four decades. Besides, where else could you turn for a primer on the backwoods culture of the Southern mountains? He needed some telling details, a few quaint folk customs, some strands of irony to elevate the sordid little tale to the level of tragedy. Details were Henry Jernigan's specialty. Well, all of their specialties, really. Each of his colleagues-cum-rivals, all of whom were probably holed up somewhere on this interminable train, had his own forte in transforming an ordinary account of human vice and folly into an epic saga that would sell newspapers. Jernigan's own skill lay in framing an incident in the classical perspective, so that every jilted lover was a thwarted Romeo, every murdered wife a Desdemona. He regaled his readers with his cultural observations, making allusions to historical parallels and literary counterparts, working in a telling quote to elevate the tone of even the most sordid little murder. High-brow stuff, so that the readers could tell themselves they weren't wallowing in the squalor of poverty and misery; they were gaining a new perspective on the essential truths of classical literature. He was lucky to work for a newspaper that could afford such literary extravagance. Some of his colleagues had to stagger along on blood and gore accounts not far removed from the True Detective pulps, and the sob sisters had to manufacture a beautiful and innocent heroine in every dung heap of a case they covered. He had heard that there were reporters who could do the job cold sober, but he wouldn't like to try it. His gaze returned to the infernal book on his lap, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Absolute hokum and melodrama: Harvard engineer romances pure mountain gal against the backdrop of a feud. Its author had much to answer for. Of course, except for the geographic location, the novel was not even remotely connected to the death in question, but if Fox's book had not existed, Henry Jernigan would be back in New York or Washington, enjoying a leisurely dinner in convivial company, instead of hurtling through the Virginia outback along with the rest of the carrion squad. Bring out your dead, he thought. The phrase was apt. It made him think, not of plague corpses on London carts, but of the influenza victims in the Philadelphia of his youth. He shuddered, and pushed away the image. He and his colleagues scavenged not on carrion, but on the hearts of the victims: the loved ones of the slain; the family of the accused; and all the peripheral little souls whose lives were besmirched by the crime of the moment. He was so pleased with the erudition of this observation that he looked around the car for some fellow sufferer to share it with, but the only other colleague he recognized was his assigned photographer, Shade Baker, slouched down in a window seat, with his hat over his eyes. Pity. Epigrams would be wasted on him. Baker was a son of the Midwestern prairie, an artist of blood and bone, using his artistry to illuminate the bruises, the blood-stained bodies, and the pathetic artifacts of the crime scene. Last year Shade's photos had illustrated the lurid stories that had waxed poetic over the battered body of little Charlie Lindbergh, unearthed from that shallow grave in the Jersey woods, so heartbreakingly close to the house from which he was taken. The Lindbergh case was the last time they had all been together. Elsewhere, Luster Swann, whose gutter press tabloid made Henry shudder, was probably chatting up the most angelic-looking girl on the train, wherever she was. Swann, a gaunt bloodhound of a man, was invariably drawn to vacant-eyed blondes who looked as if they had just wandered out of the choir loft. The irony was that there was no greater misogynist than Luster Swann, who thought all women either treacherous or wanton, or occasionally both. He seemed always to hope to find some ethereal innocent who would convince him otherwise, but he never succeeded, which was just as well, because his journalistic specialty was a judicious mixture of cynicism and righteous indignation. To Swann every female defendant was a scheming Jezebel, and every weeping victim a little tramp who deserved what ever she got. Jernigan scanned the car one more time, but no familiar faces gazed back at him. None of the others were around, but they might turn up later on in the dining car. Oh God, he needed a drink. "BE YOU HEADED for Knoxville?" Jernigan started out of a daze as if the book itself had spoken, but when he turned in the direction of the voice, he found that his seat-mate, the rabbity man in the rumpled brown suit, who had snored most of the way from Washington, had now awakened, bright-eyed and in a talkative mood. Jernigan shook his head. "Knoxville? No, not as far as that." He forced himself to respond in kind. "How about yourself, sir?" "Oh, I'm going up home to Wise. Been to see my sister and her family up in the big city." The little man looked at him appraisingly, taking note of Jernigan's well-cut suit and the gold clasp on his silk rep tie. A slow grin spread across his face. "Coal company business, then? Like as not you'll be headed up to Wise County, I reckon, to visit the mines." Jernigan inclined his head. "My business does take me to Wise County. Would you be a resident there yourself?" "Born and bred," said the man happily. "I'm not in the mines, though, no sir. My business is timber. I hope you've made arrangements for accommodations in the town already. Lodging should be at a premium this week." "In a village in the back of beyond?" Henry's murmur conveyed polite skepticism. "Why should it be crowded, especially at this bleak time of year?" The man blinked at him, astounded by this display of ignorance. "Not crowded?" he spluttered. "Did you not hear about the murder trial that's about to start up there?" Henry Jernigan was careful to set his face into a mask of polite boredom. "Why, no," he said with as much indifference as he could muster. "A murder trial, you say? I don't suppose it amounts to much, but if you'd care to pass the time, you may tell me something about it." Had he identified himself as a reporter and attempted to question this garrulous stranger about the local scandal, no doubt the man would have clammed up and refused to utter a single word on the subject, but by implying that this singular news was of no consequence to him, he had ensured that he would be regaled with every salacious detail the fellow could muster. Odd creatures, human beings, but entirely predictable, once you had learned the patterns of behavior. He contrived to look suitably indifferent to the tale. "A man got murdered up there in Wise County back in the summer," his seatmate declared. Jernigan stifled a yawn. "Nobody important, I daresay?" "Well, sir, it happened in Pound, which is barely big enough to be called a village, so everybody there is somebody, if you catch my drift. Anyhow, it wasn't no ordinary killing, no sir." "Gunned down by some feuding neighbor, I suppose? Or felled in a drunken brawl?" said Jernigan. He opened his book again. "Now that's just where you're wrong," said his seatmate, eager to be the bearer of scandalous news. "You'll scarcely credit it, but they went and arrested the fellow's wife and daughter for the crime. They let Mrs. Morton go right away, decided not to prosecute her, but they charged the daughter with first-degree murder. Yes, sir, they did. And her the prettiest little thing you ever did see, and ladylike, to boot. Been to college and then came back and taught school up home. Last girl in the world you'd expect to do a thing like that. Last . . . girl . . . in . . . the . . . world." "Pretty, you say," said Jernigan, raising his eyebrows with polite disbelief. "And by that I suppose you mean 'passably attractive for a village maiden.' Fine blond hair, good teeth, but perhaps she has the face of an amiable sheep, and the overstuffed body of a dray horse? Ankles like birch trees?" "Now that's just where you're wrong, sir," said the man, who felt that being the authority on this local sensation made him temporarily equal to this superior-looking gentleman. "Pretty, I said, sir, and pretty I meant. Miss Erma Morton is a slip of a girl, dark-haired with big brown eyes, more doe than dray horse. Just twenty-one years old. She has a quiet, ladylike way about her, too. She could be in the pictures, I'm telling you for a fact." So the accused was a beauty. Henry Jernigan relaxed a little, relieved to have the early descriptions of the accused confirmed in person by a local source. Stories about pretty girls in trouble practically wrote themselves. "Indeed?" he said. "But why would a lovely and learned young woman such as you describe resort to the killing of her own father? The poor creature was deranged, I suppose." He coughed discreetly and lowered his voice. "I have heard it said that venereal disease can--" The little man was shocked. "Why, no such thing! There was no trouble of that kind, I assure you, and I've known her all her life." "Friend of the family, are you?" said Jernigan, scenting blood. "No, I wouldn't go as far as that, but we knew her to speak to, same as anybody would. There are no strangers thereabouts. And she was always a good girl. Now I don't say the young lady didn't have a mind of her own, going off and getting educated like she did, and maybe her father was apt to forget that she was a grown girl paying rent to live there. They say he wanted to lay down the law like he did when she was a little girl. Curfews and such." Henry Jernigan was all polite astonishment. "The refined young lady killed her father over a curfew?" The authority shook his head sadly, obviously sorry that he had ever attempted to plow the stony field of this discussion. "Well, we don't know that she killed him at all," he said. "There were no witnesses. As I said, the case is just about to go to trial. It will all turn out to be some tragic misunderstanding, like as not." Jernigan nodded. With his luck, that would indeed turn out to be the case. Still, with backwoods justice, you never could tell what the outcome would be, guilt notwithstanding. In 1916 they had hanged a circus elephant at the railroad yards in Erwin, Tennessee, less than a hundred miles from his current destination. He had heard of the case when he interviewed a Tennessee congressman, and ever since then he had dined out on that story, dramatizing the incident for his listeners over cigars and brandy, and always ending with the solemn admonition: "So, gentlemen, if you are ever charged with murder in the great state of Tennessee, do not plead elephant. It is not a valid defense." Excerpted from The Devil Amongst The Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb. Copyright 2010 by Sharyn McCrumb. Published in 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher. Excerpted from The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.