All 12 Ballad Books In Order at Book DNA

1
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood investigates the threatening messages being sent to Peggy Muryan, a famous folksinger of the 1960s, who has returned to her hometown of Hamelin, Tennessee, in search of peace and quiet

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2
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

Summoned to the scene of a ghastly crime in her remote Appalachian village, Laura Bruce, the new minister's wife, realizes that Sunday school teacher Nora Crumb's dark visions have come true.

3
She Walks These Hills

Katie Wyler still crosses Ashe Mountain, and although a few can see her, Deputy Sheriff Martha Ayers doesn't believe in ghosts. Hiram Sorley has escaped after 30 years in prison and he's on his way home to Ashe Mountain. Only Martha seems to understand that Sorley's wife and daughter are…

Leslie's list on the best novels where the sense of place is so strong it becomes a character

4
The Rosewood Casket

As Randall Stargill's four sons prepare to bury their late father, Randall's former sweetheart, Nora Bonesteel, brings a small box to be buried with him, a box containing a child's bones, in a mystery complicated by the efforts of a real-estate developer to obtain the Stargill homestead. Tour.

5
The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Obsessed with a nineteenth-century murder in which a young woman was hanged for the crime, Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood suspects that an innocent man is about to die for killing a young couple hiking the Appalachian Trail. 85,000 first printing. Mystery Guild Main, Lit Guild Feat Alt, & Doubleday Alt.…

6
The Songcatcher

Folksinger Lark McCourry retraces the history of a family song, which she had heard from her North Carolina relatives as a child, back to eighteenth-century Scotland to young Malcolm MacQuarry, kidnapped and sent to the American colonies, where he eventually became a lawyer and fought in the American Revolution. 60,000…

7
Ghost Riders

Critically acclaimed New York Times-best-selling author Sharyn McCrumb chronicles the Civil War in the Southern mountains in Ghost Riders, an extraordinary tale of a war fought farm to farm, neighbor to neighbor in the North Carolina mountains, a part of the South that never wanted to leave the Union. Ghost…

8
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

Book cover of The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

In 1935, when Erma Morton, a beautiful young woman with a teaching degree, is charged with the murder of her father in a remote Virginia mountain community, the case becomes a cause célèbrefor the national press.

Eager for a case to replace the Lindbergh trial in the public’s imagination, the…

9
The Ballad of Tom Dooley

A literary triumph—what began as a fictional re-telling of the historical account of one of the most famous mountain ballads of all time became an astonishing revelation of the real culprit responsible for the murder of Laura Foster

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley…The folk song, made famous by the…

10
King's Mountain

John Sevier had not taken much interest in the American Revolution. Homesteading in the Carolina mountains, Sevier was too busy fighting Indians and taming the wilderness to worry much about a far-off war, but when an arrogant British officer sends a message over the mountains, threatening to burn the settlers'…

11
Prayers the Devil Answers

Sharyn McCrumb, New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Ballad series set in Appalachia, explores the ties between a reluctant female sheriff and a condemned man in this stunning and powerfully written Depression-era novel.

Years later, after the tragedy, someone remembered the Dumb Supper and what had happened there.…

12
The Unquiet Grave

From New York Times bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb comes this finely wrought novel set in nineteenth-century West Virginia, based on the true story of one of the strangest murder trials in American history-the case of the Greenbrier Ghost.

Lakin, West Virginia, 1930-Following a suicide attempt and consigned to a segregated…