Jan. 9, 2025
Friends and booklovers gathered tonight at Park Road Books for the formal launch of “Deadly Secrets,”
“The Park Road Books event went well, with about 55 there… It’s been a good week.”
In her fiction, Stancill writes about some bar-hopping, crowd-haranguing, cutthroat types. After the book event, Stancill wrote, “Though I enjoyed having friends there, it was a bit too much of a crowd scene (for me) to be comfortable.” Proof that fiction is not autobiography.
https://qcnerve.com/nancy-stancill-deadly-secrets/
Pat Moran
January 9, 2025
Queen City Nerve
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, documented shockingly high tobacco use among high school and middle school students, and profiled a strip club owner who later bribed former Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon.
Over a decade into her second career as a crime novelist, the now-retired local journalist published her latest thriller, Deadly Secrets, on Dec. 12. The Charlotte-based writer will take part in a Q&A and sign copies of her new novel, one of three featuring reporter/sleuth Annie Price, at Park Road Books on Jan. 9 at 7 p.m.
The conversation will be facilitated by a colleague of Stancill’s, former Charlotte Observer reporter and Money Rock author Pam Kelley.
Stancill’s latest fictional tale is just as compelling as the stories she covered as a reporter. In Deadly Secrets, the dogged and indomitable Price solves a string of murders involving a charismatic pastor who has established a right-wing Christian state in the western North Carolina mountains.
After writing for the Houston Chronicle and other papers in Texas, Stancill worked 10 years for the Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2009. She says the Price series, which launched in 2013 with Stancill’s debut novel Saving Texas and continued with Winning Texas in 2016, is the result of the author staying in her lane.
“We write what we know, and I know newsrooms and reporters,” says Stancill, who published her memoir, Tall: Love and Journalism in a Six-Foot World, in 2020. She adds that she’s not above embellishing the documentary-style realism of her crime fiction with a few touches of glamour.
“I wanted a heroine who was 6 feet tall like me,” says Stancill. “But who was cuter, had better clothes, and a more exciting love life.”
The plot of Deadly Secrets is not exactly ripped from today’s headlines, but the story holds up a recognizable mirror to America’s political landscape in which religious zealots are working to steadily deconstruct the wall separating church and state.
In the novel, minister King Avery persuades state and federal authorities to establish the 51st state of Westcarolina. Avery becomes its first governor, determined to impose his evangelical beliefs on what he calls “the first Christian state.” Aided by ruthless secessionist Rob Ryland as lieutenant governor, Avery grabs every opportunity to curtail his constituents’ civil liberties while lining his pockets.
Meanwhile, The Charlotte Press hires Texas reporter Price to expose Avery and his God’s Gift Church. This explosive situation soon becomes a backdrop to murder.
Nancy Stancill’s ‘Deadly Secrets’
With her mystery novels, Nancy Stancill says she tries not to be too partisan with her own political views but adds that she staunchly supports the separation of church and state: “No ‘godly state’ for me.”
She notes that the novel’s first chapter describes the bombing on an abortion pill factory and that readers might infer from the sequence that she is pro-choice.
For those seeking a message, Stancill directs readers to the book’s front cover blurb from BestThrillers.com: “Crackling with immediacy and suspense, ‘Deadly Secrets’ is an unforgettable political thriller about murder, corruption and personal freedom.”
“I think this country is deeply divided,” Stancill says. “That’s probably why this novel seems believable.”
To those who know her, it’s no mystery that Stancill loves western North Carolina, where her third novel is set. She grew up in the nearby mountains of eastern Tennessee, plus some time in Virginia.
In the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and the long recovery process it has engendered, Stancill is devoting half her proceeds from Deadly Secrets to Asheville-based charity Hearts with Hands.
In a passage from her novel that describes the region and the tourists drawn to its scenery, Stancill writes of Price, “She knew she was looking at the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their blue haze, a reflection of the blue-green fir and balsam forests that grew there, was distinctive. Leisurely drivers flocked to the gorgeous Blue Ridge Parkway in autumn to see red, yellow and orange fall colors. In the spring and summer, tourists could look forward to the healthy foliage sprinkled with wildflowers.”
The tourists that flocked to the mountains each autumn were not able to do so in the fall and might not return at the same levels for a long time, she pointed out in a blog post on her website titled “My heart and book belong to the mountains.”
“Roads are badly damaged, and many restaurants and hotels won’t be open … How will the region’s fragile economy recover without tourism?” she continued.
Despite the corruption and murders that thread through her mountain mystery, Stancill says she hopes that residents of the region won’t be offended by the plot, instead seeing Deadly Secrets as a tale well told, albeit a cautionary one.
“I love that area,” she says. “I certainly don’t wish for it to have an evangelical minister at the helm.”
Highlights from a reporter’s notebook
Nancy Stancill’s approach to journalism was inspired by her late father Godfrey Wells Stancill, who worked as editor and publisher of the Radford News Journal and the Suffolk News-Herald in Virginia.
“I’ve never seen anybody work harder than he did to put out the truth in a good paper,” Stancill says.
Godfrey Stancill could do everything, she recalls — write stories and editorials, sell ads, and take pictures at children’ s ballgames.
“If somebody didn’t get their paper, he would get up from dinner and go deliver it,” Stancill says.
After graduating from the UNC Chapel Hill with a journalism degree, Nancy worked for newspapers in Texas for 15 years, much like her fictitious alter ego Annie Price. In 1993, she moved to Charlotte and started her stint at the Observer.
A 1994 story titled “Desperate Wives Settle for Less” reported on wealthy, powerful men delaying divorce settlements, in one case nine years, through unscrupulous lawyers.
“One of these poor [ex-wives] was living out of her car,” Stancill says, pointing to the results of her investigation. “Essentially, the judges were ashamed that they did not notice [the long delays, and] the legislature was appalled.”
Stancill’s reporting inspired new legislation that punished unreasonable delays while judges began sending most divorce cases to a more streamlined dispute resolution process
Another one of Stancill’s stories involved a Gastonia couple that owed more than $180,000 in credit card debt.
“The husband was making $20,000 a year and his wife was disabled,” she recalls. The couple lived on credit cards, and the credit card companies just kept signing them up for new cards.
“That was a dramatic example of how credit card companies were just savaging the consumers,” Stancill says.
The town of Robbinsville in western North Carolina came to Stancill’s attention when a survey conducted in the municipality revealed that 70 % of its high school kids smoked – and that the percentage of smoking among middle school kids was almost as high.
“It was tragic,” Stancill says. “I interviewed a 12-year-old boy that said he had been dipping snuff since he was 5 — and his parents bought it for him.”
The story took Stancill to an international smoking conference in Beijing, where the Chinese government admitted that it was selling cigarettes to children.
In retrospect, Stancill says reporters in her generation didn’t know they were living in a golden age of journalism.
“I remember 1994 and 1995 as the years of big raises,” Stancill says. “[But] you could see things slowly going downhill.”
Falling circulation was a warning bell, followed by diminishing ad sales with Craigslist beating out local classifieds for advertising dollars.
“When I came in 1993, there were 250 people in the newsroom,” Stancill says. “They created the investigative team, and they had all these bureaus.”
Now the Observer’s newsroom staff listing totals less than 50 people.
Stancill left the Observer in 2009 and moved to London. While living there in 2010, she wrote Price’s first adventure, Saving Texas. The plot was inspired by reporting Stancill did about a corrupt community college in Texas, and on the state’s longstanding secessionist movement, which also informed Price’s follow-up mystery Winning Texas.
Annie gets shot at the end of the second book and is recovering as Deadly Secrets opens, and while Nancy Stancill has never found herself under literal fire for her reporting, she is certainly no stranger to second chances, as the journalist turned novelist has found a groove in the world of fiction.
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Sept.8, 2024 #bookandcat
