Southern Lit Alliance announces guest speaker Michael Almond’s company at the Arts Building on Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. Mr. Almond will be discussing his debut murder mystery and legal thriller novel, The Tannery, as well as discussing the history and personal involvement behind the story. Tickets will be $15. For more information, visit https://www.southernlitalliance.org/.
Review for The Tannery:
The Tannery details the tumultuous investigation of the mysterious, brutal murder of a young white woman in Post-Reconstruction North Carolina. Her father and tannery owner, Jakob Schumann, enlists the help of prosecutor Vincent Taliaferro, who immediately pins the blame on Virgil Wade, a sixteen-year-old mixed-race boy. However, local lawyer Ben Waterman remains unsure and begins to fight his way through the investigation of unclear evidence, racial tension, and Jim Crow ideals to convince a jury of all white men of Virgil’s innocence. Waterman will stop at nothing on his quest for truth in order to free a potentially innocent man from the grips of racism.
Mr. Almond, a retired international business attorney, was raised in the small town of Pilot Mountain in the Piedmont foothills of North Carolina. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a Fulbright Scholar in political science at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His accomplishments as an attorney and experience in business law make him an equally accomplished businessman and author, giving him “the heart of an author, and the mind of a historian.”
An avid reader of Southern history and literature, Mr. Almond finds his passion writing about the rich history of the South. He and his wife Helen Ruth reside in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with two horses, three donkeys, and their canine companions, Lucy and Greta. The Tannery is his debut novel.