The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir
Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony by David La Vere.

Offering a fresh view of one of America’s greatest mysteries, David La Vere blends fact and fiction in his historical account of the false Dare stones. After a legitimate record detailing the fate of several of the colonists was discovered on a large stone in 1937, answer-hungry experts fell for a farmer’s bogus claim to have found the remainder of the Dare stones. Switching between the academic account of the investigation and the false story embedded in the rock, La Vere, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, shows us that the past can never truly be buried.

Dram Tree Books. 2010, 237 pages, paperback, $19.95. Available at dramtreebooks.com.