http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article81577132.html

JUNE 4, 2016 2:16 PM

‘Winning Texas’ a fast-paced thriller

BY MARY CORNATZER

[email protected]

“Winning Texas” is the second thriller from former Charlotte Observer reporter Nancy Stancill featuring fictional Houston Times journalist Annie Price.

It picks up a few years after the events in “Saving Texas,” Stancill’s debut, but you needn’t have read one to enjoy the other.

Price is an editor now, working with an understaffed investigative team at the money-troubled Houston Times and missing reporting. Her chance to get out of the office comes when one of her reporters is murdered.

But who’s behind it? Could it be the strip club owner he was looking into? Or the man’s mysterious Brazilian girlfriend? Or maybe it has something to do with a group pushing to turn Texas Hill Country into a German Texas enclave?

The senator behind the effort says it’s about cultural identity and economic development, but Annie isn’t so sure.

Into the plot, Stancill mixes a missing teenager (daughter of a former gubernatorial candidate), smuggled Albanian strippers, illegal gambling and the growing remnants of the Texas secessionist movement, which caused so much trouble in her first book.

Full disclosure time: Stancill is the sister of N&O higher education reporter Jane Stancill. I’ve never met Nancy Stancill, but I’d say her years in journalism, including a stint at the Houston Chronicle, serve her well.

She captures a newsroom’s camaraderie and angst (though mercifully leaving out much of the drudgery), while her descriptions of Houston and the whole of Texas make you feel the heat and see its beauty.

She takes some journalistic license by having Annie sleep with a cop who’s her source (that would be an ethical no-no), but I like that Annie has a messy life (she drinks a bit too much, falls for the wrong men) and two cats.

Oh, and another quibble: She wraps up that investigative story before most newsrooms would have had their first meeting about it.

Stancill keeps the pace fast and the characters coming – at first I thought I was going to need to jot down notes to keep up with them. But she expertly weaves reporters, strippers, smugglers and gamblers in and out of the story so you never have to remind yourself who’s who. And then she pulls the threads together for a satisfying ending.

But instead of tying everything up, that ending promises more on the way — which is something to look forward to.

http://mdpaust.blogspot.com/2016/05/winning-texas-nancy-stancill.html

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2016

WINNING TEXAS – Nancy Stancill

Matthew Paust, Hampton Roads, Va.

Bad news in Texas is good news for Annie Price, the leggy, intrepid Houston Times investigative reporter whose exposés broke up a dangerous secessionist plot and quashed a rich rancher’s campaign for governor. Bad news good for Price despite the cost of a colleague’s murder and almost her own, such being the calculated risks for clarion snoops of her stripe.

That was four years ago, described with nail-chewing suspense in Saving Texas, prequel to Winning Texas. Their author, former investigative journalist Nancy Stancill, has worried bad guys for newspapers in Houston, Charlotte, N.C., and Newport News, Va.

This time there’s bad news for Price as well as the other kind of bad news, the good bad kind. Although she’s been promoted to investigative editor, her newspaper is sinking like the Titanic—the deck is already awash under her feet, and the water’s rising. But this is the kind of bad news daily newspapers are facing everywhere, with plunging readership and advertising revenue forcing owners to cut operating costs. This includes freezing pay, leaving vacancies open, and laying off staff. Price’s team of reporters is stretched so thin she’s forced to grab her notebook and hit the pavement herself when, while eating breakfast, she hears on the radio that a floater has turned up in the Houston Ship Channel by the Valero petroleum refinery. “Floater” is police parlance for water-borne corpse.

She heads down to the channel, her mind spinning with anxiety and excitement:

She’d never outgrown a reporter’s stage fright, even now as a fairly experienced editor. She was spending too much time at her desk editing other people’s stories. Would she still be able to coax enough details out of the police? Could she frame her story fast enough to be competitive? Would she get all the details right? Timing was everything on the police beat, especially now that Houston’s radio, TV and newspapers all had fiercely competitive websites. She was definitely rusty and she’d always performed better on longer stories with more expansive deadlines. But she knew that once she got on the scene she’d stop worrying, and her skills would take over.

To her relief the lead detective on the scene is an old friend. They go for coffee. He fills her in on the skimpy available facts, which she phones in to the newsroom. For Annie Price the game is literally afoot once again.

Stancill bases her fictional material on real happenings. In Saving Texas, the secessionist movement, Nation of Texas, resonates from a long tradition of secessionist feeling in the Lone Star state. Annie Price’s reporting drives it underground, but it’s creeping back in the sequel. This time the ex-CIA operative who’s secretly behind Nation of Texas targets a new group that’s promoting German-Texas, also inspired by circumstances outside the novel. According to the Texas State Historical Association, “after Anglos, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, the ethnic group with the largest impact on Texas has been the Germans.” Probing by Price and her team turns up key figures in the German-Texas movement, being sold ostensibly on the idea of encouraging businesses to emphasize their ethnic culture as an attraction for tourists to the Central Texas Hill Country, location of the largest German settlements.

As with the Nation of Texas movement, German-Texas has some questionable undertones, including a plan to arm members of the community supposedly as an adjunct to understaffed police departments. One of the movement’s biggest donors is a man who owns a chain of strip clubs. A Houston Times reporter, one of Price’s team, is beaten to death behind one of these clubs after trying unsuccessfully to interview the owner. Someone slashes the tires on Price’s car parked behind her apartment. Another member of her team leaves to take a TV anchor job, and, as if in spite, moves in on Price’s former fiance. Her personal life takes an unexpected hit when, intending to surprise her new lover at his apartment with the key he’d given her, she finds him in bed with another woman.

Of course she’s battling a drinking problem—the traditional occupational hazard, but… But she’s intrepid, remember? Did I mention the “sinking” newspaper? Price can’t help wondering if the Houston Times will still be there to print the story she’s working on, if in fact she and her shrinking team can manage to live long enough to crack the case. The paper’s owners have already jumped ship, notifying their employees in a grim newsroom meeting they’ve sold out to a hedge fund that intends within several weeks to shift the entire news operation to its website. This would mean reducing the already downsized staff to little more than a handful of reporters and editors. Would Price even have a job?

She can’t let this stymie her, though, intrepid newsie that she is. Do she and her two remaining reporters get the story? Bet on it. Is there still a Houston Times to print it? Barely. Will there be a sequel to Winning Texas? Stancill promises us there will. It’s a credible promise, too, as, like at the end of Saving Texas, a couple of really bad guys are still on the loose. There’s even a chance Annie Price will finally make it to the altar with one of her on-again-off-again boyfriends, this one looking like a sure thing. If so, will her two cats mind? Probably, but isn’t that what cats do?

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/books/reading-matters-blog/article78814787.html

MAY 20, 2016 7:00 AM

Nancy Stancill’s latest a twisty Texas thriller

Author to talk at Park Road Books on Wednesday

 

BY DANNYE ROMINE POWELL

You hold your breath when a friend writes a book.

Will I like it? What if I don’t? What can I say that’s supportive but non-committal?

The Pulitzer-winning novelist Peter Taylor once said he couldn’t be friends with someone whose work he didn’t like. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but there are risks.

Well, whew! I happen to really like Nancy Stancill’s latest novel, “Winning Texas.” Stancill is a good friend and former Observer colleague, and she’s given us a taut thriller with a rabbit warren of twists. It’s a newspaper novel, set in Houston, where Stancill once worked as an investigative reporter.

Oh, sure, there are a couple of dead bodies. But Stancill goes beyond the whodonit to a world of frenzied intrigue. Hers is a Texas where one group plots to secede and form an independent nation, and another group longs to turn the Hill Country into German Texas. Add to that, a group of Albanian strippers herded off to an isolated ranch, where they are to produce babies for the wealthy.

Stancill’s tireless hero, investigative reporter/editor Annie Price, makes you wish you were 40 again.

Stancill will talk about “Winning Texas” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Park Road Books. It’s free, and you’re invited.

Oct. 7, 2014

Q&A with journalism school alumna, author Nancy Stancill

Sindhu Chidambaram in The Daily Tar Heel

http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/10/qa-with-journalism-school-alumna-author-nancy-stancill

Author Nancy Stancill graduated from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1971. She wrote for The Daily Tar Heel before graduating, then moved to the Houston Chronicle for 15 years and then the Charlotte Observer for 16 years. She now lives in Charlotte and works as a full-time writer. 

Staff writer Sindhu Chidambaram spoke with Stancill about her writing career, her time at UNC and her latest project. 

The Daily Tar Heel: Can you tell me about “Saving Texas”?

Nancy Stancill: I had this idea — Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, had been saying things, kind of outrageous things, about secession, and I think he made some comments to the effect that ‘we don’t like what the feds are doing, well, we could always leave,’ because Texas was an independent republic for 10 years before it entered the Union as a state. Texas was always sort of an independent spirit. So anyway, when Rick Perry said that it got me to thinking, ‘Well, what if? What if there were people that were in political circles that wanted to make Texas a republic again?’ And that’s the basis of my story.

DTH: What should readers expect and look forward to in the book?

NS: Well, I think they can look forward to a genuine tale of journalism and a pretty good thriller with several murders and a lot of suspense.

DTH: What parts of the plot were based on your personal experiences?

NS: One experience I had was I had to interview these two people that were the head of the college, and they didn’t like the questions I was asking so they just got up and walked out, and I walked out following them down the hall asking questions. And that was a true experience.

DTH: How far do you want to take this story?

NS: I originally thought I would make this a trilogy, and I still might do that, but I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m kind of in the middle of writing this sequel, and I think I’ll decide as I finish the book whether I want to go any further with this character.

DTH: Did you face any challenges in the writing process?

NS: I think all writers face the challenge of actually sitting down and doing it. That’s kind of the biggest challenge of writing. But there were also challenges of style. When you’re a journalist for 30-plus years the way I was, you write in a very journalistic style — very scarce sentences, very few adjectives. You stick to the facts, you try not to embellish your style too much. But when you’re writing fiction, you have to learn to write much more sweeping sentences.

DTH: How did your time at UNC shape your writing career?

NS: Working on The (Daily) Tar Heel was exciting. To be given a daily assignment and to know that I had to somehow get it done that day. That really helped me as a writer — a lot — and it also showed me the fun of newspaper work.

DTH: Looking back, what was the most meaningful thing you did during your time at UNC?

NS: I loved it all, actually. I can’t think of anything I didn’t love. I think being at university means so much to a person who comes from a small town because it’s the first time they’ve ever felt really free and have the kind of opportunities to meet people and to really pace life.

DTH: What advice do you have for aspiring writers at UNC?

NS: I would say just to write as much as you can and write as many different kinds of things that you can — write short stories, write newspaper stories, write poetry, keep a journal. I think the more you write, the better you get and the more you enjoy it. If you think you have a novel in you, just start writing pieces of it.

Sept. 5, 2014

 

Investigative journalism comes naturally for Nancy Stancill

 

Josh Whitener in The Charlotte Weekly

 

Her dad was an editor and publisher of a small paper in Virginia, and Stancill spent more than 30 years as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the Charlotte Observer, with much of her time spent covering investigative beats. Now her goal is to use her experiences and writing skills to tell suspenseful and insightful stories through her first novel, “Saving Texas.”

“I had so many interesting experiences working (as an investigative journalist) … I thought I really would like to write a book about what it’s really like to be an investigative reporter,” Stancill said. “I’ve always seen investigative reporters as today’s detectives, (so) I wanted to make the reporter the focus of the action in the book.”

Stancill will visit the Morrison Library, located at 7015 Morrison Blvd., for a reading on Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 6:30 p.m. She will be on hand to answer questions and discuss “Saving Texas,” a thriller centered on a 36-year-old newspaper reporter, Annie Price, who is investigating a corrupt political campaign in Texas involving secession from the U.S.

Part of Stancill’s inspiration came from her experience working on a story about a community college in Texas that “turned out to be very corrupt,” she said. She also drew from Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s comments about Texas possibly seceding from the U.S.

“That got a lot of publicity, and I thought, ‘What if?’” Stancill said.

Stancill began writing the novel after moving to London, England, in 2009. She spent about a year writing the book and had a “pretty good draft” when she and her husband moved back to Charlotte in late 2012. Stancill spent about another year-and-a-half polishing and editing the book, which included eliminating extraneous characters and trimming the plot at the suggestion of a writer friend.

The toughest part, Stancill said, was actually sitting down and writing the draft.

“I think it’s just the discipline you need – making yourself sit down and write every day for a couple of hours at least,” she said. “You just have to decide what you want to do and try to do a little bit every day.”

A self-proclaimed “avid reader” and a fan of mysteries and suspense thrillers, Stancill drew inspiration from some of her favorite authors – including Elizabeth George and British writer P.D. James – while penning “Saving Texas.”

“I’ve always loved things that were really plot-driven, so I think you just try to emulate the writers you like,” she said.

The best part about writing the novel, Stancill said, was reliving some of the “wonderful experiences” she had as an investigative journalist. She said her book hearkens back to her own “heyday in the 1990s” as a reporter.

“It was wonderful for me to kind of relive some of the golden days of journalism,” Stancill said. “The heroine, Annie Price, is in a newsroom that’s really struggling in the current day, downsizing in different ways, but still able to do good journalism, and I think it was the ‘good journalism’ part that really fascinated me.”

But “Saving Texas” isn’t just a throwback novel – Stancill also crafted a present-day story aimed at being relevant to current events. She also wrote the novel as a cautionary tale to “kind of put out a warning that this … kind of journalism that exposes corruption and wrongdoing is really imperiled by today’s journalism world (and its) problems.”

Stancill is currently working on a master’s degree in creative writing and plans to use her education to write a sequel to “Saving Texas.” In the meantime, she’s excited her book has received positive feedback since being released in October 2013 and hopes to use the novel not only to create awareness of the threat to investigative journalism, but also to financially support the industry, as she’s donating some of the proceeds to a fellowship that helps send journalists to the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Conference each year.

“I really believe in the power of investigative reporting and want to support that,” Stancill said.

Find more information including a link to purchase the book at www.nancystancill.com.