Dear Gentle Reader,

Happy Valentine’s week. The time is nigh as Pete announces today the winner of the Beltie Prize!!

After many a sleepless night debating the merits (of which there were many) of each of this year’s finalists, what put the winner over the top was the sense of nostalgia it invoked in me. It took this judge back to his first days as a bookseller when pulp fiction had gone mainstream: authors like Elmore Leonard and Robert B. Parker ruled the shelves and the door was opened for women like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky to step outside of the cozy side of things. It was a period when every word mattered, dialogue fueled the plot, and the story came to us, the reader, instead of us chasing the story through thickets of overwrought prose and silly plots of serial killers who can’t put the past behind them.

Ah, those were the good ‘ole days. With that said, this year’s Beltie Prize goes to:

 K.C. Constantine and Another Day’s Pain

“In this, the last of his Rocksburg series (which started in 1973 and now ends with Mr. Constantine’s death shortly before publication), we follow Detective Ruggerio “Rugs” Carlucci on his rounds one night in the small Pennsylvania town of Rocksburg where not much seems to happen except small town stuff. But, wow, what small town stuff! Rugs has to have his mother arrested, a neighbor forgets to take her meds and starts singing naked in the neighborhood, and that’s just the start of a long night for Rugs.

Nobody writes likes this anymore and that is a shame. With sharp dialogue and succinct prose, with characters we can all relate to, this is one of those hidden gems we come across only occasionally. I just wish I had found him sooner. ” – Pete

Andrew Lawler will be here this Saturday, February 15th at 11am. We are pretty darned excited to welcome him back and hear about his latest work, A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution. History buffs take note, Lawler unveils some new information which shows that the South played a bigger role than previously acknowledged in the war against imperial rule. He tells the story of the American Revolution from the perspective of Virginia, as the events that occurred there in 1775 and 1776 were, if anything, more consequential than the much more famous battles up north in Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. They very much involved militia from North Carolina, and what occurred in Virginia will change your understanding of the Revolution, for what motivated Virginians and North Carolinians to oppose the British Crown (slaves and land, also shared by other southern colonies) was very different than what inspired people in the North. This is a story that, remarkably, has never been told in full, and it inspired eminent historian Woody Holton to say “it casts the nation’s founding in a whole new light…and offers the historian’s holy grail of an original argument.”

With great sadness we join those in mourning another great writer from North Carolina, Tom Robbins. The author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker and Jitterbug Perfume, passed this weekend at 92. His joyous contortion of the English language made his books the backbone of many a beach trip for Keebe’s friends along with books by David Sedaris and Christopher Moore. While many of his brilliant quotes have been sailing around the ether, let us end with the oft repeated, “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” Take that to heart…

The Usual Suspects,

Pete, Johanna, Sarah, Tyler, Amy and Keebe