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Back to topAuthors Val Nieman and Landis Wade
Two amazing N.C. authors join us to discuss their latest novels, books, and the writing life, plus anything else that comes up. Join us for a fun conversation! Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Landis Wade is a recovering trial lawyer, host of Charlotte Readers Podcast, and author of books and stories whose third book—The Christmas Redemption—won the Holiday category of the 12th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards, and was the 2018 Holiday category Honorable Mention in the 10th Annual Readers’ Favorite Awards. He won the 2016 North Carolina State Bar short story contest for The Deliberation and received awards for his non-fiction pieces, The Cape Fear Debacle and First Dance. His short work has appeared in Writersdigest.com, The Charlotte Observer, Flying South, Fiction on the Web and in more than six anthologies, including by Daniel Boone Footsteps.
Valerie Nieman has been a newspaper reporter, farmer, sailor, teacher, and always a walker. She is the author of To the Bones and three earlier novels. Her work has been published widely here and abroad and collected into three books of poetry and one of short fiction She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships.
Our protagonist likes to keep us guessing in this atmospheric, beautifully written mystery. Maggie is looking forward to getting out of Filliyaw Creek to study marine biology at UNC-Wilmington. But something happens on prom night that threatens her future and leaves her beautiful cousin dead. Maggie lives on a houseboat on the edge of a backwater, and lives for her sailboat, Bellatrix, and her favorite writer, "Carl" Linnaeus. Maggie's story is drenched in the drowned and abandoned history of the man-made lake, her parents' sad breakup, and the possibility of a murderer on the loose--a murderer who seems to be stalking her.
It's a tightly wound mystery that keeps you guessing until the end, as an unreliable narrator chooses to reveal pieces of the story at her own, creeping pace. The nature writing is evocative and immersive. I felt like I was lost in the woods or on the water with Maggie, always looking over my shoulder.
It’s modern day in the New South City of Charlotte, North Carolina, when an unlikely trio of retirees at the Independence Retirement Community, a/k/a The Indie, team up to solve two mysteries related to the death of a 96-year-old resident. Why was his manuscript about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence missing when they found his body? And why did his handwritten will dated the day he died disinherit his beloved granddaughter (his only heir), and leave his $50 million fortune to Sue Ellen Parker, the most despised resident at the Indie? At the urging of Chuck Yeager Alexander, an optimistic soul who loves historical conspiracies, and Harriet Keaton, a former businesswoman with an extreme dislike of Sue Ellen Parker, Craig Travail, a trial lawyer recently ousted from his law firm after 40 years, reluctantly goes to court to challenge the dead man’s will for the granddaughter. This decision sets in motion a series of dangerous events that could lead the threesome to discover the answer to a colonial mystery that has evaded historians for 250 years. That is, if they don’t die trying