Vicki Lane Books In Order

Publication Order of Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Vicki Lane
Author Vicki Lane has lived on a mountain farm in Madison County, North Carolina since 1975. Vicki, a descendant of pioneer Alabama farmers and Floridians, was raised in Tampa, Florida.

She graduated from the University of Florida, where she took just one creative writing class and penned one truly terrible short story “Too Late the Snow”. Her early dreams of becoming a poet became dashed when the New Yorker rejected her very first submission.

In the year 1963, she married her high school sweetheart and went on to teach English at a Tampa prep school and got her MA in English Lit, without any short stories were written, just one mock-epic for some class on Pope.

Then, in 1975, seduced by The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News, Vicki, her husband, their two dogs, and their three year old son moved to a mountain farm where they learned from their neighbors how to butcher pigs, milk cows, raise tobacco, and plow with mules. While still living on the same farm, in 2000, with the same husband, another son, and a ton more dogs, she realized that she was an English major and decided she’d try her hand at writing a mystery novel.

She signed herself up for a short class (called Writing Fiction That Sells!) at a local community college, just to be told by the instructor that she didn’t have the necessary passion to pen a novel. Her first novel was published by a major New York house, and they published the next five of her Elizabeth Goodweather mystery novels.

Vicki’s work has been praised for its evocative detail, and authentic dialogue, and her clear, rich, and intelligent writing which captures the essence of the Carolina mountains and its people.

“Old Wounds” was nominated for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award for Fiction and a Book Sense Notable. “In a Dark Season” hit the SIBA bookseller list the week it was released, was an Anthony nominee for Best Paperback Original, and was a Romantic Times nominee for Best Contemporary Suspense/Mystery of the year 2008.

However, she got fed up with the amateur sleuth mystery genre and found herself being captivated by a local story. The Shelton Laurel Massacre of 1863, which took place in the same NC county that Vicki’s called home for many years. She had read about the massacre, and drove by the house of Colonel Lawrence Allen, the commanding officer on the cold day back in 1863.

She eventually felt compelled to pen a novel all about the massacre, sticking to the facts just as much as possible. Vicki did some reading which just left her fully confused as to what actually happened back then. Primary sources were often improbable and were contradictory, keeping her from getting a handle on the story, not allowing her a way to tell it.

While diving into the past, she realized she was dealing with a multiplicity of unreliable narrators, a device beloved of mystery authors wherein the narrator doesn’t give over the entire truth however just the truth as he understands it or wishes it to be understood. That is when she knew exactly how she wanted to tell this story.

“Signs in the Blood” is the first novel in the “Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery” series and was released in 2005. Elizabeth Goodweather and her husband have built a rewarding life for themselves in the hollows and hills of their adopted Appalachian home. However Elizabeth’s all alone now, since her husband has been tragically killed, her kids all grown, and the land around her filled with beliefs and customs that she cannot share. It is still a good life as she tends to the small flower and herb business yet her fragile peace is soon going to be shattered.

Cletus Gentry disappeared while he was hunting ginseng in the hills and his mom is sure this childlike man was murdered. While Elizabeth retraces his final wanderings, she is going to learn that a murderer has been waiting the entire time in the hollows and coves close to her farm in order for her to see the light, then come willingly to her death.

“Art’s Blood” is the second novel in the “Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery” series and was released in 2006. North Carolina’s hills are this crazy quilt of new beginnings and old farmsteads, of strangers, locals, new age wanderers, and artists. It is here that Elizabeth Goodweather has made her life, a still-young widow that moves easily between the gentrified world of Asheville and old timers in their hollows.

However a flamboyant performance artist gets murdered, and Elizabeth discovers the amazing history of a magnificent piece of folk art, and she winds up getting caught between two different worlds. Not to mention getting caught in the middle of an agonizing mystery.

One young woman, who takes her artwork right to the breaking point, has brought a history of unexplained deaths and some dangerous liaisons into Elizabeth’s life. Courted by a former cop, attempting to protect her love-struck nephew, Elizabeth knows that danger has just entered her peaceful world. However she cannot guess just how deadly this threat is, nor exactly how masterfully a killer is able to hide.

“And the Crows Took Their Eyes” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2020. In a bitterly divided western North Carolina, Confederate troops execute thirteen boys and men that are suspected of Unionism. The Shelton Laurel Massacre, which is what it’s come to be known as, is just a microcosm of the horrors of civil war, with neighbor against neighbor and violence being at one’s own front door.

Told by the people that lived through it: the colonel’s wife, the jealous second-in-command that gives the fatal order, the mute girl (whose folk magic yields an unexpected result), a helpless witness, the canny mountain woman that cares for her land and her people, the conscript (a haunted man seeking redemption). It’s these voices that offer an intimate glimpse into the lives of five different people all tangled up in history’s web, all caught up together in hate and love.