The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

Author McCrumb returns to the setting of the Blue Ridge Mountains in The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, her long-awaited new Ballad novel. The novel is set in a small coal town in southwestern Virginia in November 1935. A pretty, young schoolteacher named Erma Morton stands accused of killing her father. Journalists from the big newspapers in New York are converging by train on the small mountain town. Henry Jernigan
has already decided he will depict Erma as an innocent victim. He and Rose Hanelon, a so called sob sister write the story they feel their readers expect. Many other journalists plan to write of the backward hillbillies they expect to find in the small town. Carl Jennings, however, just wishes to write what really happened. He's just 18 and on his first assignment. Carl comes up with an excuse to invite his 12-year old cousin Nora Bonesteel to the mountain town. Nora, an old woman in the other Ballad novels, has the sight. Carl is hoping Nora can tell him something of the murder that the other reporters cannot know. McCrumb's Ballad series is quite interesting and as usual the author shows great detail and description of place.