Eastern North Carolina is a land of contrasts, and its crime stories bear this out. A lovelorn war hero or a stalker? Conniving wife or consummate homemaker? Murder or suicide? The answers can be as puzzling as the questions. Mystery author Cathy Pickens details an assortment of quirky cases, including a duo of poisoning cases more than one hundred years apart, a band of folk hero swamp outlaws, sex swingers and a couple of mummies. Each story has, in its way, helped define Eastern North Carolina and its history.

Eastern North Carolina is a land of contrasts, and its crime stories bear this out. A lovelorn war hero or a stalker? Conniving wife or consummate homemaker? Murder or suicide? The answers can be as puzzling as the questions. Mystery author Cathy Pickens details an assortment of quirky cases, including a duo of poisoning cases more than one hundred years apart, a band of folk hero swamp outlaws, sex swingers and a couple of mummies. Each story has, in its way, helped define Eastern North Carolina and its history.

North Carolina's Triangle region is known for universities, research facilities and politics, but even in such a prosperous, diverse, modern environment, crime helps define the edges. These cases cover several decades of murder, fraud and betrayal. Read about the nation's largest prison escape and a couple of North Carolina's poisoners. From a civil rights-era clash of Old South and New and a suspected Cold War spy to new-tech sleuths and tales of diligent as well as discredited investigators, these stories will keep you entertained and aghast at the dark side of daily life. Crime writer Cathy Pickens explores a collection of headline-grabbing tales that shows the sinister side of the Triangle's cities.

Avery Andres has just been downsized from her job in a law office in a North Carolina city and has returned to her small home town to lick her wounds and consider, with hesitation, trying to set up a law practice there. She quickly gets a client or two, and immediately the company building owned by one is destroyed by arson, and the body found inside was quite probably murdered. Meanwhile, an old high-school classmate has told the entire county that he is hopelessly in love with Avery and makes several attempts at spectacular suicides, each one of them carefully set up not to work. All in all, Avery finds that small-town life is not nearly so dull as she feared. And sometimes wishes it were.

Settled as a maritime and agricultural colony, North Carolina's history has always been intertwined with agriculture and farming. After the Civil War, North Carolina became the nation's top grower of tobacco, and one of the country's largest tobacco companies--the American Tobacco Company--flourished from the huge quantities of Eastern North Carolina-grown tobacco that was purchased. With the growing success of cotton farming and other crops and livestock--including corn, peanuts, and hogs--the region was particularly rich in subsistence farming. Over the course of the 20th century, farming and agriculture went through tremendous change. The familiar landscape of cotton and tobacco began to shift and include more varied crops, such as soybeans and sweet potatoes. At the same time, hand tools were exchanged for tractors and combines. Eastern North Carolina Farming showcases the rich history of this agriculturally dynamic region while telling the individual stories of farmers who grew for families, markets, and distribution.

North Carolina holds a special place in the history of moonshine. For more than three centuries, the illicit home-brew was a way of life. NASCAR emerged from the illegal moonshine tradeas drivers such as Junior Johnson, accustomed to running from the law, moved to the racetrack. A host of colorful characters populated the state's bootlegging arena, like Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, known as the Paul Bunyan of moonshine, and Alvin Sawyer, considered the moonshine king of the Great Dismal Swamp. Some law enforcement played a constant cat-and-mouse game to shut down illegal stills, while some just looked the other way. Authors Frank Stephenson and Barbara Mulder reveal the gritty history of moonshine in the Tar Heel State.

The Gory Stories Behind The Murder Ballads Cheerfully vulgar, revelling in gore, and always with an eye on the main chance, murder ballads are tabloid newspapers set to music, carrying word of the latest ‘orrible murders to an insatiable public. Victims are bludgeoned, stabbed or shot in every verse and killers often hanged, but the songs themselves never die. Instead, they mutate – morphing to suit local place names as they criss cross the Atlantic and continue to fascinate each generation’s biggest musical stars. Paul Slade traces this fascinating genre’s history through eight of its greatest songs. Stagger Lee’s “biographers” alone include Duke Ellington, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Dr John, The Clash and Nick Cave. No two tell his story in quite the same way. Covering eight classic murder ballads, including “Knoxville Girl”, “Tom Dooley” and “Frankie & Johnny”, Slade investigates the real-life murder which inspired each song and traces its musical development down the decades. Billy Bragg, The Bad Seeds’ Mick Harvey, Laura Cantrell, Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family and a host of other leading musicians add their own insights.

Explore the international headlines and the little-known crimes, the solved and the wrongly solved, in these tales of the North Carolina mountains. Western North Carolina is known for mountain vistas and wild, rocky rivers, but remote wilderness and quaint small towns can have a dark side. Learn the truth behind the famous murder ballad Tom Dooley. Delve into the criminal history of moonshine, and the tales of two unexpected bombers in idyllic Mayberry. Crime writer Cathy Pickens brings a novelist's eye to Western North Carolina's crime stories that define the sinister--and quirky--side of the mountains.

The crime that shocked post-Civil War America and inspired the folk song that became The Kingston Trio’s hit, “Tom Dooley.” At the conclusion of the Civil War, Wilkes County, North Carolina, was the site of the nation’s first nationally publicized crime of passion. In the wake of a tumultuous love affair and a mysterious chain of events, Tom Dooley was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of Laura Foster. This notorious crime became an inspiration for musicians, writers and storytellers ever since, creating a mystery of mythic proportions. Through newspaper articles, trial documents and public records, Dr. John E. Fletcher brings this dramatic case to life, providing the long-awaited factual account of the legendary murder. Join the investigation into one of the country’s most enduring thrillers. “Fletcher has spent a great deal of time researching almost all of the characters involved with the Foster homicide and has gone further than any researcher I know in establishing the relationships—blood, marriage and social—between the major actors in the tragedy.”—Statesville Record & Landmark

Written within a cloistered environment to protect sources that have yet to be identified, TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE is a chilling portrait of two beautiful, successful women whose murders were made to look like suicides. Jenn Corbin appeared to have it all: two little boys, a posh home in the suburbs of Atlanta, and a husband - Dr Bart Corbin, a successful dentist - who was handsome and brilliant. Then, in December 2004, Jenn was found dead with a bullet in her head, apparently by suicide. Only later would detectives learn that another woman in Dr Corbin's past had been found years earlier with nearly the exact same wound to the head, also ruled a suicide. In TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE, Ann Rule - working in cooperation with victims' families, police investigators, and sources from Georgia to Australia - unravels the now-sensational deaths. What emerges is an incredible tale of jealous rage; of stunning evidence that runs from the steamy to the macabre; and of a fateful, mind-boggling coincidence that appears to have motivated the killings. The definitive unravelling of one of the strangest murder investigations of our time, this is the greatest achievement of a truly great writing career.