Prayers the Devil Answers (Hardcover)

from hardlyhardy

Sharyn McCrumb's “Prayers the Devil Answers” has a murder, but no mystery. The man who pushes his wife from a cliff fails to notice he has two witnesses. He makes no attempt to escape and offers no defense at his trial. He goes to the gallows without protest. So where lies the drama, where the su...

from laytonwoman3rd

Listed as No. 11 in McCrumb's ballad series, this novel isn't built on a legend, but grew out of a germ of historical fact. In 1936, the last public hanging ever carried out in the United States was presided over by a woman sheriff, who was filling out her deceased husband's term of office. This ...

from bookczuk

I like Sharyn McCrumb's novels for the slice of America she brings back to mind. It's been a long time since I read one of her books, and picked this up solely because of her name, but quickly became drawn into the story of a Depression-era widow who takes on the job of her dead husband, to becom...

from hubblegal

Ellendor Robbins is a wife and mother in the Appalachian Mountains in 1936. When her husband unexpectedly dies, she's faced with raising her two young sons alone. She must decide whether to return to her brother-in-law's home as a charity relative or try to take on her husband's job, which was sh...

from Katharine_Hanson

This is book is very slow going. The first half of the book I felt could have been condensed into 50 pages. The characters didn't seem very vivid to me, and Ellandor, the main character, was rather one dimensional. There's a ton of repetition of phrases which I found odd and thought that the edit...