Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories »

Sharyn McCrumb is the author of The Rosewood Casket, She Walks These Hills and many other acclaimed novels. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She was named a “Virginia Woman of History” for Achievement in Literature in 2008. She lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge, less than a hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790 in the Smoky Mountains that divide North Carolina and Tennessee.

"In an earlier life, McCrumb must have been a balladeer, singing of restless spirits, star-crossed lovers, and the consoling beauty of nature. . . . The overall effect is spellbinding."
—The Washington Post

Bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb is "a born storyteller" (Mary Higgins Clark) who astonishes readers and reviewers with the power and scope of her talent, prompting the San Diego Union-Tribune to declare: "There is no one quite like her among present-day writers. No one better, either."

Foggy Mountain Breakdown, the first-ever collection of Sharyn McCrumb's short fiction, is a literary quilting of old and new, humorous and heartfelt, offering award-winning works—and two stories never before published, contrasting mountain childhoods past and present.

Chilling tales of suspense alternate with evocative character portraits and compelling narratives that embrace the southern Appalachian locales and themes of McCrumb's acclaimed Ballad Novels. Within this cornucopia of two dozen stories, Old Rattler, a mountain healer, skirmishes with a serial killer . . . Princess Di investigates long-kept secrets within the House of Windsor . . . A reincarnated murder victim seeks delicious revenge . . . And while honeymooning in the bridegroom's ancestral hilltop homeplace, two newlyweds harbor second thoughts.

The author's perfect-pitch ear for dialogue and ability to illuminate the dark side of human nature merge with her brilliant artistry to make Foggy Mountain Breakdown a virtuoso collection for devotees of Sharyn McCrumb—and for the legion of new readers who will find themselves caught under her spell.  

Publishers Weekly

"I grew up seeing the world as an exciting place," writes popular mystery writer McCrumb (If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him) in the introduction to her first short story collection. "The quiet tales of suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me." It shows in these 25 tales, most set either in the Appalachia familiar to her fans or in her mother's "flatland South"; the title story is a portrait of her father's spartan childhood in rural Tennessee. "Love on First Bounce,'' written when McCrumb was in high school, introduces feisty Elizabeth MacPherson, heroine of eight later novels. Elizabeth is reading Dorothy Parker when we meet her; so, evidently, was McCrumb, who learns from Parker how to prod her stories along with pointed, dismissive phrases (of a boy-crazy friend: "She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect"). Fourteen novels haven't dulled McCrumb's wit. A few of these stories are bloodcurdling character studies; others are pervaded with loneliness and despair, and some draw on the legends of her Scottish ancestors. Ordinary housewives, a potential serial killer and isolated, poor mountain folk caught between or straddling cultures are grist for her imagination. Perhaps the best entries in the collectionamong them "Gentle Reader," which chronicles the short but profitable epistolary friendship between a popular Southern mystery writer and a mysterious fanadopt the politely satirical tone of her mysteries and are sure to please her readers (gentle and otherwise). (Sept.)