Longtime Chatham County bookseller Pete Mock of McIntyre’s Books shares his affinity for suspenseful plots so that readers can experience the thrill of answering a mystery novel’s key question: Whodunit? Check out the mystery aficionado’s book recommendations — written by North Carolina authors — for a month of nonstop thrills. Then, learn more about Mock here.
This fast-paced crime novel follows the intertwined stories of three principal characters, with events set off by the kidnapping of a pizza restaurant employee. “Eryk is just a great writer of Southern noir,” Mock says. “You’ve got characters who are antiheroes, and while we may not agree with them, in the hands of Eryk, we have empathy for them despite what they have done.”
Investigative reporter Laura Chambers is tasked with identifying the female victim of a hit-and-run accident in Hillsborough. She doesn’t recognize the woman but learns that the victim’s last phone call was to her. Soon, Laura begins questioning the events surrounding the murder of her best friend’s parents two decades earlier and begins to see a link between the two mysteries.
Patton Harcourt, a librarian in a small North Carolina town, teams up with a professional assassin in this novel by Winston-Salem author Charlie Lovett. Harcourt and the assassin soon become entangled in a plot to decipher an unsolved Nazi code from an Enigma machine, and the two embark on a journey across Europe to survive and outlast their enemies. “[This book is] like early Ken Follett,” Mock says. “Lovett writes these great historical bibliophile mysteries.”
When a visiting businessman is found dead in the fictional mountain town of Miracle Springs, bookstore owner Nora Pennington and a close-knit group of women take on the crime, working to unravel the secrets that this small town holds as they simultaneously learn more about one another. This book is in a subgenre of mystery called “cozies,” which are, as Mock describes, “often very localized in terms of setting.”
When it comes to spreading holiday cheer, the residents of this Chatham County town start early.
Our editor in chief shares a few treasured memories from her childhood home, a Christmas Eve night being one of the very first.
We took some, ahem, creative liberties when we combed through Our State’s archives to find a few favorite stories that carry the tune of a Christmas classic.
From decades-old family recipes to a centuries-old Carolina cookie, we’re filling our holiday tables with dishes that have stood the test of time.
