by Mark Pinsky | Mar 15, 2022 | Crime, Drifting into Darkness, Met Her on the Mountain
For years, true crime has been considered a low- and middle-brow guilty pleasure, dating back to the 19th century Police Gazette tabloids. To be sure, since then, there have been modern crossover exceptions – books like In Cold Blood, The Stranger Beside Me, and Fatal...
by Mark Pinsky | Mar 1, 2022 | Crime, Met Her on the Mountain
For more than three decades in the latter part of the 20th century, the Democratic political machine led by Zeno and E. Y. Ponder wrested control from Republicans and thereafter controlled pretty much everything in Madison County. Zeno was the Democratic Party...
by Mark Pinsky | Feb 25, 2022 | Excerpts, Met Her on the Mountain
The first reports of the murder were vague. A young antipoverty worker had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered in the mountains of North Carolina, her body discovered on an abandoned logging road almost within sight of the Appalachian Trail. Although the brutal and...
by Mark Pinsky | Feb 22, 2022 | Crime, Met Her on the Mountain
Not to be outdone by Marshall, the hilltop college town of Mars Hill has become part of the Madison County boomlet, according to a Dec. 2, 2021 article by Linda Ray in the Asheville alternative weekly, The Mountain Xpress. She writes, “Mars Hill’s Main Street has...
by Mark Pinsky | Feb 15, 2022 | Crime, Met Her on the Mountain
Met Her on the Mountain is, as my evangelical friends like to say, “the book of my heart,” a work of decades. This new edition is in hard cover, Kindle, and, for the first time, trade paper. The first thing you may notice is that there is a new cover and a shortened...
by Mark Pinsky | Feb 8, 2022 | Crime, Met Her on the Mountain
Decades ago, when I started researching what would become Met Her on the Mountain in Madison County, North Carolina, I was advised to seek out the county’s foremost folklorist, Richard Dillingham (pictured above left). It was great advice. Richard was a font of...
