Recent discussions on the DorothyL list caused me to order this book before I started my State Mystery Project. It takes place in North Carolina and I couldn't wait that long to read it; plus, having already read books by Sharyn McCrumb and Phillip DePoy, I'm familiar enough (vicariously) with the western NC mountains that, when I get to the state in my project, I'll be looking for something different, maybe coastal or the Research Triangle. Nevertheless, I hope Vicki Lane writes many more books about Elizabeth Goodweather and the area in which she lives.

SIGNS IN THE BLOOD has some structural similarities to Sharyn McCrumb's GHOST RIDERS, which I read a short time back. Both alternate a modern story with a tale from the mountain past, told in the first person. I think Ms. Lane's is by far the better book. For one thing, the present-day story in SIGNS IN THE BLOOD is a true mystery and not ashamed to be one, whereas that in Ms. McCrumb's book rambles from character to character and never seems to go anywhere either as a mystery or a novel. The story from the past in Ms. Lane's book also brings to mind the tales in Deborah Grabien's Haunted Ballad series, in that we first hear a garbled version (or versions) of the story and, bit by bit, learn the truth.
I don't mean by these comparisons to suggest that Ms. Lane's book is other than original -- quite the contrary. She has written an excellent book -- setting, characters and plot are all first-rate.

Ms. Lane's protagonist, Elizabeth Goodweather, is a complicated character and a person I'd love to know in real life. As a relative newcomer to the mountains, she has made friends with the local people and learned much from them while maintaining her own sense of who she is. When her friend Birdie's "slow" son Cletus disappears while out hunting ginseng, Elizabeth tries to help find him. When Cletus's body is found in a river, and Birdie can't believe his death was an accident as the Sheriff believes, Elizabeth begins to investigate in earnest. Her investigation leads her to some interesting and rather scary places -- to services at a snake-handling church where she encounters a prophetess with messages for her, to a "New Age" community with a sinister feel, to a group of right-wing militiamen and to a revival preacher who's also an "Outsider artist."
It's been five years since Elizabeth's husband was killed in the crash of a private plane. Only now has she really begun to allow herself to grieve for him, and perhaps because of that, she is also allowing herself to be a bit interested in men again. One of them is the preacher at the snake-handling church, to whom she is strangely attracted in spite of their having almost nothing in common; the other is an old friend of her husband's, a policeman, who shows up in nearby Asheville and wants to renew their acquaintance. When Elizabeth is the recipient of various threatening gestures, suspicion falls on both men. Indeed, there is plenty of suspicion to go around and red herrings abound. The thrilling denouement kept me up well past my bedtime.

SIGNS IN THE BLOOD is a bit longer than most mystery novels, but there was not a page I would willingly have had left out. I'm rating it five stars/excellent and highly recommend it.
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