These Blue Mountains

Name: These Blue Mountains
Rating: 4.4 (101 reviews)

by Sarah Loudin Thomas

First published 2025

Amazon

4.3(101)

In 1932 German pianist Hedda Schlagel travels to western North Carolina to recover the remains of her fiancé Fritz, a civilian seaman detained in the United States during World War I. The discovery of a woman’s body in the coffin bearing his name turns an act of mourning into a criminal mystery. Deputy Garland Jones, who helped with the original burial, must revisit a wartime episode he has never fully understood.

Hedda’s search links the Hot Springs enemy-alien camp to the emerging community around Black Mountain College and to a Germany moving rapidly towards Nazi rule. Encounters with Josef and Anni Albers show one possible future for displaced artists, while her attachment to Garland complicates the duty she feels towards Fritz’s mother in Berlin. The novel brings mystery and romance together through questions of exile, concealed identity and whether loyalty to the dead must determine the life of the living.