New Releases by T. R. Pearson

When a mild-mannered undertaker in 1870s Oklahoma loses two friends to outlaw violence, he swears vengeance and sets out to make himself an instrument of frontier justice. The results are more complicated, funnier, and far less satisfying than he hoped. A new novel of the old west by the author of DEVIL UP.

In the spring of 1879, a sixteen-year-old boy from the Virginia uplands finds himself alone on the Great Plains with a Colt Navy revolver and the family mule. What was meant to be a frontier adventure with two of his friends has turned into a solitary ordeal as he makes his way across a sparsely settled and largely lawless piece of the world. He’s bound for California and narrates his journey in harrowing and hilarious detail, telling the story of a farm boy from back east who becomes -- through pluck and heart and more than a little gunplay -- a man.

A small Virginia town, long since bypassed by the interstate, has but two claims on historical significance -- a plaque marking the route where General Longstreet''s army retired from a defeat and a near derelict Georgian mansion called Eaglesworth. The house sits on a hilltop, neglected and weathered, until a stranger rolls in to bring it back to life. The lively story of the sordid secrets the renovation reveals is told by a pack of local barflies, a ragged bunch of half-cocked civic boosters and gossips who give us history as seen through the bottom of a shot glass. Funny, bittersweet, and glancingly philosophical, Eaglesworth is a fanciful biography of a place, a latter-day slice of the Old Dominion that the Sage of Monticello would hardly recognize.

A corrupt police detective enjoying semi-retirement in Tidewater Virginia stumbles onto an unsolved homicide that, given his nature, he''d be happy to leave unsolved. But a few people in his life have other ideas and drag him into an investigation that offers a chance for some small measure of redemption if he''ll only take it. As murder squads go, this crew is no A Team -- just an adolescent kid from up the block, a mouthy, conspiratorial-minded paraplegic, and an unhappy housewife our rotten cop met by chance in a Trader Joe''s. What these three lack in savvy and expertise, they more than make up for in blundering determination, so Theory of the Case becomes the story of one man''s trio of mongrel friends refusing to let him go on being what he''s been.

Eighteen-year-old Hoyt MacKenna -- friends and family call him Mack -- was born a Low Lord in Cumberland, Tennessee. That makes him part of a secret society founded by statesman and inveterate caver Thomas Jefferson. Low Lords are cavern minders, each group a family unit. The clans rotate to new sites every eight years or so and, as much as possible, live apart from the general population so as to devote themselves to their sole duty of keeping what''s under down.What''s under? Alabastards -- an ancient blend of humanoid and reptile built for cavern living and increasingly determined to get out into the light. Low Lords is a family-friendly, quasi-historical freak show of a fantasy, a coming-of-age story with headlamps and monsters

Top of the Rock is an absorbing insiders’ account of an incredible time and place in television history: the years when Must See TV—led by Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and Law & Order—made NBC an unstoppable success. Here the story is vividly told through the words of the actors, writers, producers, creators, and network executives who helped the Peacock rise to its greatest heights—and then saw it all fall apart. Under the supervision of President of Entertainment Warren Littlefield, NBC went from being an also-ran, losing millions of dollars in failed shows, to the number one station, generating billions of dollars in profit. At its height, the Thursday night lineup alone brought in more revenue than the other six nights of programming combined. Top of the Rock dishes out behind-the-scenes stories from all the biggest shows, revealing the highly risky business decisions, creative passion, and blind leaps of faith that made Must See TV possible. Jerry Seinfeld | Jason Alexander | Kelsey Grammer | Sean Hayes | Helen Hunt | Lisa Kudrow | Eriq La Salle | Matt LeBlanc | John Lithgow | Julianna Margulies | Eric McCormack | Debra Messing | Megan Mullally | David Hyde Pierce | Paul Reiser | Noah Wyle | and more

Deputy Ray Tatum returns in a story of Blue Ridge crime and carnage, kicked off by the discovery of a body high in the limbs of a black oak tree. Wry, laconic, and more than a little world-weary, Tatum pursues a savage killer through the rural Virginia uplands with the hot-headed assistance of Special Agent Kate LeComte. Warwolf is by turns hilarious and deeply unsettling, and T.R. Pearson''s gift for capturing the true voice of the new south is on conspicuous display. The mountains of Virginia have never seemed so dangerously alive, and there remains no better company in the southern highlands than Deputy Ray Tatum. Ray Tatum also appears in Cry Me A River, Blue Ridge, and Polar -- written to be read in no particular order.

Lucas McCarty lives in the Mississippi Delta. He is the only white congregant in the African-American Trinity House of Prayer Holiness church. Lucas is bereft of the ability to speak due to cerebral palsy, yet he sings there in the church choir. Thus is the subject of Year of Our Lord, a portrait of courage, acceptance and grace, rendered in the lyrical prose of T.R. Pearson and the haunting photographs of Langdon Clay. Year of Our Lord is a visual journey, exploring one of the poorest parts of the American South, a place that economic progress has left behind. And it is a spiritual journey, a revelation of a community that has replaced the hope for earthly prosperity with an abundance of faith in God and the life beyond. The Delta¿s is a culture that can look upon Lucas and say, ¿God don¿t make mistakes.¿ It is a place that in the face of abject poverty can proclaim, life offers ¿too much joy!¿ Year of Our Lord, then, is an opportunity to see into another¿s world, and to embrace the best of it.

Set in the Appalachian highlands of Virginia, JERUSALEM GAP is the timeless story of a boy and his dog, an OLD YELLER for the 21st century. Big boy. Good dog.

The story of a public school biology teacher and a National Gallery curator who join forces to thwart the dire consequences of a medieval Italian curse.

A fitness pioneer and ALS patient documents his creation of a new model for private medical research and development for less common and less profitable diseases, describing how his entrepreneurial partnership with the Muscular Dystrophy Association enabled significant results in its first two years.

An adventure-filled, wry, and often hilarious account of the adventures of William Willis, a man who rafted across the Pacific in his 60s and again in his 70s is complemented by the stories of various other crazy rafters of the 1950s and 1960s.

Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson''s Neely, North Carolina, doesn''t appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.

Loner and small-town accountant Paul Tatum forges a friendship with fellow recluse Stoney, with whom he shares a fixation on a local damsel in distress before Paul goads Stoney onto a course of action with tragic consequences.

Deputy Ray Tatum searches for a missing child in the Virginia Blue Ridge Parkway while the local denizens, including his hotheaded girlfriend and oddball, Clayton, help him slowly unravel the mystery of the lost girl.

Hogarth, Virginia Deputy Sheriff Ray Tatum begins his investigation into the discovery of a complete set of human bones on the Appalachian Trail, while at the same time his cousin Paul is summoned to New York to identify the dead body of the son he scarcely knew. 22,500.

A murder and its consequences in a small Southern town are the backdrop to Pearson''s investigations of a fictional world where laugh-out-loud humor is interwoven with some of mankind''s darkest impulses.

When Donnie Huff survives a near-fatal logging accident, his ambitious mother-in-law insists that he has returned from the dead, and he embarks on a Pentecostal revival trail and a discovery of his own faith.

The extraordinary new novel by the author of A Short History of a Small Place is a moving celebration of romantic love in all its marvelous--and humorous--varieties.

Louis Benfield narrates the tragic history of his family from the Civil War to the present day.

T. R. Pearson, author of last year''s A Short History of a Small Place , again presents an intimate view of small-town North Carolina, but Neely is no Mayberry, and its residents remind one more of a Southern verison of The Beans of Egypt, Maine than of Andy Griffith. The Neely-ites are a motley crew, known by lineage and physical attributes ("the bald Jeeter"). Raeford Benton Lynch, of the Chickenhouse Lynches, never has done a great deal with himself, until he hires on with a grave-moving crew and meets hot-blooded Jane Elizabeth Firesheets, whose charms lead him to a life of crime. Pearson has a dense, folksy style all his own, and although his storyline sometimes gets muddled and his prose busy, his originality and unerring sense of place make this book a winner. --Ann H. Fisher, Library Journal.