Category Archives: 1990-1999

1990-1999

by | March 13, 2008 · 9:58 am

Clyde Edgerton. Where Trouble Sleeps. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1997.

Jack Umstead is a professional con man and a fugitive from the law. When he first shows up here, he has just arrived in the small town of Listre, N.C., where he’s working on an elaborate scheme, but first, he must earn the trust of the residents. The story is told by a number of narrators, including Umstead himself and some of the people he has taken in. The result is a full and comic portrait of Listre, a fictional town in eastern North Carolina, which is the setting for several of Edgerton’s novels.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1997, Coastal Plain, Edgerton, Clyde, Novels Set in Fictional Places

by | · 9:58 am

Patricia Cornwell. Hornet’s Nest. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996.

Best-selling novelist Patricia Cornwell sets this mystery in Charlotte, “a city of ambition and change.” During an especially hot summer in the Queen City, a number of tourists are gruesomely murdered, and all are left with the same mark of an hourglass on their bodies. A serial killer is clearly at work. Police chief Judy Hammer and her deputy Virginia West battle city politics while they work with young Charlotte Observer reporter Andy Brazil to uncover the facts of the case. As the police procedural unfolds, Cornwell describes the physical and cultural landscape of North Carolina’s largest city.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1996, Cornwell, Patricia, Mecklenburg, Mystery, Piedmont

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by | · 9:58 am

Doris Betts. Souls Raised From the Dead. New York: Knopf, 1994.

The novel looks into the troubled relationship between Mary Grace Thompson, the teenage daughter of state trooper Frank Thompson, and her estranged mother, Christine. Mary Grace has a life-threatening kidney disease and the story takes us through the emotions and spiritual questioning a family faces during a tragedy. The novel is set in Carrboro, Hillsborough, Durham, Jacksonville, and Chapel Hill at the UNC hospital.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1994, Betts, Dorris, Orange, Piedmont

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Ellyn Bache. The Activist’s Daughter. Duluth, Minn.: Spinsters Ink, 1997.

In this novel set amidst the Civil Rights protests of the early 1960s, Beryl Rosinsky has graduated from high school and is anxious to get away from her activist mother and her hometown of Washington, D.C. She enrolls at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she finds a different world — conservative, Southern, and with long-standing campus cliques firmly established. Beryl is gradually drawn into local Civil Rights protests, which are may be based on actual demonstrations by UNC students against segregated businesses in Chapel Hill. As a result of her own political awakening, Beryl ends up with a deeper understanding and appreciation of her mother.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1997, Bache, Ellyn, Orange, Piedmont

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by | · 9:58 am

Alice Adams. A Southern Exposure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

At the end of the Great Depression, Harry and Cynthia Baird and their 11-year-old daughter move from Connecticut to Pinehill, N.C., a fictional town probably based on Chapel Hill. Hoping to escape debt, drinking problems, and past mistakes, the family is plunged into small town southern culture. The novel traces their attempts to fit in to a tightly woven community.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1995, Adams, Alice, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont

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