The Devil Amongst the Lawyers - (Ballad Novels) by Sharyn McCrumb (Paperback)

About the Book

In the wake of a sensationalized 1934 trial involving an Appalachian Virginia teacher's alleged murder of her tyrant father, novice journalist Carl Jennings is denounced by a greedy media determined to portray the defendant as a backwards mountain girl.

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"The story begins with a train ride, a magic carpet that carries us back to the year 1935 and into the heart of a famous murder trial. As we head for the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, we get to know the characters, those journalists and photographers and sensation-seekers who always turn up for a good spectacle.

Sharyn McCrumb re-creates this time and place with such precision, the reader forgets that seventy-five years have passed since that faraway event in that isolated place where the outer world clashes with superstition and folklore. This is storytelling as those Celtic bards meant it to be: lyrical, haunting, and truly unforgettable." --Cathie Pelletier, author of The Funeral Makers and Running the Bulls

"Sharyn McCrumb re-creates this time and place with such precision, the reader forgets that seventy-five years have passed since that faraway event in that isolated place where the outer world clashes with superstition and folklore. This is storytelling as those Celtic bards meant it to be: lyrical, haunting, and truly unforgettable." --Cathie Pelletier, author of The Funeral Makers and Running the Bulls

"Wow! Sharyn McCrumb is not just a writer---in fact, she's a conjurer, a genius, a wordsmith, an entertainer, a wit, a scholar, a wise woman, and a storyteller of the first rank. The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is flat-out brilliant and transcendent, a book that gets everything exactly right. Simply put, novels don't come any better than this." --Martin Clark, author of The Legal Limit and The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living

"The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is a superb novel that, once started, is so well written and so expertly researched that readers will find it impossible to put down. It is also a scathing indictment of how Appalachia has been, and continues to be, stereotyped by a supposedly objective media. Bravo!" --Ron Rash, author of Serena

"There are few writers today who are able to blend past and present, tradition and law, legends and headlines in a wholly credible fashion-- Tony Hillerman springs inevitably to mind. Sharyn McCrumb is another; her widely acclaimed Ballad Series is one of the finest being written today." --Bookpage on Sharyn McCrumb

"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 on The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

About the Author

Sharyn 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.