If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood keeps the peace in his small Tennessee town most of the time. Every once in a while, though, something goes wrong.

When 1960s folksinger Peggy Muryan moves to town seeking solitude and a career comeback, and she receives a postcard with a threatening message, her idyll is shattered. Then a local girl who looks like Peggy vanishes without a trace.

Although she was once famous, Peggy has no fondness for the old times. Those days are best left forgotten for Spencer Arrowood, too. But sometimes the past can't rest, and those who try to forget it are doomed to relive it....

Sharyn McCrumb is an internationally acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose work has been honored with all five of the major awards in crime fiction (Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero)--and two Best Appalachian Novel awards. She is the creator of the esteemed Ballad Novel series, the first of which--If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O--was a New York Times Notable Book. The most recent installment in her satirical mystery series featuring forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson is If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him....

Ms. McCrumb lives in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband David and their two younger children, less than a hundred miles from the Smoky Mountain valley where her ancestors settled in 1790.