Was it a curse that years later would lead to the tragic events? Teenager Celia partakes in an ancient, midnight ritual with five of her classmates that is believed to reveal who and when, or even if, she and her friends will marry. Did that one glance over her shoulder break the magic spell that would change the lives of so many?

A number of years later, Ellendor Robbins sits vigil at the bedside of her dying young husband, Albert, the recently elected county sheriff in northern Tennessee during the Great Depression. Even in good times, women had limited options for employment in a region where the railroad and sawmills held what few jobs there were for men. She is self-educated to read and write, but with no formal education, she sees a bleak future of taking her two small sons to return to her poverty-stricken hill family. Albert had been good with people but less capable with the managerial part of the job, so Ellie had taken care of the paperwork during his brief term.

"Not only is McCrumb a masterful storyteller in the classic sense of the word, but her deep love and historical background of her native Appalachian ancestry create a tapestry to be relished by her readers."

Following Albert’s death, Ellie desperately wants her boys to get the formal education she never had, so she steels herself against her quiet and restrained back-country ways to convince county officials that she can handle the administrative duties of the job. The deputies don’t want it. Albert is the second sheriff to die in the past year --- the first one was shot, and then Albert succumbed to pneumonia --- but they are happy to stick to their duties of settling drunken brawls between the railroad men and sawmill workers, the occasional break-in, or complaints about the transient hobos wandering the land across America. When a shocking murder occurs and the killer is sentenced to hang, Ellie discovers what managerial duties really mean.

Once again, Sharyn McCrumb has wrapped the history, superstitions, struggles and dogged determination of the people of her beloved Appalachia into a compelling novel. She brings to life the itinerant artists who, under Roosevelt’s WPA New Deal arts program, earned their livelihood by painting murals of local historical events in public buildings; the stark truths when single “schoolmarms” must leave their profession if they marry; the limits of folk medicine in treating diseases; and the plight of orphaned children with nowhere to turn.

Not only is McCrumb a masterful storyteller in the classic sense of the word, but her deep love and historical background of her native Appalachian ancestry create a tapestry to be relished by her readers. She spins a yarn a mile long and a yard wide, as an Ozark raised-relative used to say who claimed it took a good storyteller a while to get there, but the pattern he or she creates is in the magic of the weaving.

In PRAYERS THE DEVIL ANSWERS, we get caught up in a vibrant and suspenseful tale of a woman’s courage, in a time and place we won’t soon forget.