That Bright Land [Hardcover]

Winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Prize.

A new Southern gothic thriller from the winner of the 2012 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.

In the Summer of 1866, Jacob Ballard, a former Union soldier and spy, is dispatched by the War Department in Washington City to infiltrate the isolated North Carolina mountain community where he was born and find the serial killer responsible for the deaths of Union veterans. Based on true events,That Bright Landis the story of a violent and fragile nation in the wake of the Civil War and a man who must exorcise his own savage demons while tracking down another.

Early in this gripping whodunit set in the summer of 1866 from Roberts (A Short Time to Stay Here), Zeb Vance, the real-life governor of North Carolina, meets with his Yankee nephew, Jacob Ballard, a former Union soldier and retired detective who now works for the War Department in Washington City. Someone is murdering North Carolinians who fought for the North during the Civil War, and Vance wants Ballard to apprehend the killer. Ballard travels to mountainous western North Carolina, many of whose residents were hostile to the Confederacy. There he presents himself as a government agent checking on the legitimacy of Union army veterans disability benefit claims. Ballard finds some correspondence between the list of those seeking the payments and the names of the murder victimsand support for Vances notion that the motive for the crimes is connected with an 1863 Confederate massacre of Union sympathizers. This historical approaches the high standard of Owen Parrys mysteries set during the same period. l£*