Nov. 26, 2025
I’m thrilled and humbled at the honor from QCNerve, Charlotte’s estimable alternative newspaper, in their Best in the Nest year-end edition. Here’s what they wrote:
BEST FICTION WRITER: Nancy Stancill
In Nancy Stancill’s more than 30-year career as an investigative reporter, she’s exposed wealthy men delaying divorces to punish their ex-wives, unveiled credit card companies luring consumers into crippling debt, and profiled a strip club owner who later bribed former Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon.
The fiction the retired journalist and former Charlotte Observer staffer writes in her second career as a crime novelist is just as scandalous and intriguing.
In Deadly Secrets, reporter/sleuth Annie Price solves a string of murders involving a charismatic pastor who has established a right-wing Christian state in western North Carolina.
“I wanted a heroine who was 6 feet tall like me,” Stancill told Queen City Nerve in January, following the book’s December 2024 release, “but who was cuter, had better clothes, and a more exciting love life.”
Deadly Secrets draws from Stancill’s knowledge of newsrooms as well as her love of western NC’s mountains.
In the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene on the region, Stancill devoted half her proceeds from Deadly Secrets to Asheville-based charity Hearts with Hands.