Jerry Bledsoe Books In Order

The Angel Doll

If even a small part of a child still lives within your heart, you can’t help but be captivated by this deeply moving novella based on bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe’s childhood memories. Set in a North Carolina manufacturing town during the 1950s, it is the poignant story of two ten year old boys and their search for an angel doll, a search that turned into a lesson of love. Every day Whitey Black reads The Littlest Angel to his sister Sandy, a four year old stricken with polio. Now she wants just one thing for Christmas: an angel doll. Unfortunately, in this small North Carolina town, no one has ever heard of such a thing. Nevertheless, Whitey Black and his best friend set out to find her one, at great cost and for even greater reward. Along the way they learn much about sadness and heartbreak, but most important, they learn about the transformative power of love. The Angel Doll is about childhood reaching out in later life and grabbing hold never to be forgotten or remembered exactly as it was. Timeless and touching, The Angel Doll is sure to become a family favorite and a tradition for years to come.

Bitter Blood

In this unrelenting real life drama of three wealthy families connected by marriage and murder, Bledsoe recounts the shocking events, obsessive love, and bitter custody battles that led toward the bloody climax that took nine lives. Reissued to coincide with Bledsoe’s new hardcover Blood Games 11/91.

Blood Games

An account of the murder of wealthy North Carolinian Lieth von Stein describes how von Stein’s stepson, a young man obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, attacked his mother and stepfather in their beds while they slept.

Before He Wakes

Recounts the case of Barbara Stager, a seemingly devoted wife and community member whose murder of her husband was nearly ruled an accident until chilling evidence, including the death of her first husband, revealed Stager’s secret double life.

Death Sentence

Everybody knew Velma Barfield as the perfect wife and a loving grandmother. But there was something about her that nobody knew…
Velma Barfield had a secret life, and a sick urge to kill. ‘Fast paced…
breathes new life into the true crime genre.’ Raleigh News & Observer’Taut and engrossing.’ Booklist’Get ready for the Velma Barfield story…
complete with all the prescription drug overuse, the arsenic, the drunkenness, the spouse abuse and the redemption. It’s the equal of any suspense novel going.’ Times NewsBurlington, NC’Bledsoe has written a detailed account of Barfield’s troubled life and motives…
holds the reader’s interest with a true story that reads like a novel.’ Library Journal’Undertakes to answer the questions about the justice system and the motives that drive women to kill.’ Washington Post Book World’An important commentary of the standing of a nation’s soul, with journalistic integrity and the resonance of a fine novel.’ Will Campbell’The Master of true crime.’ Patricia Cornwell

Death By Journalism?

When Rhonda Winters, director of the Archdale campus of Randolph Community College, decided to offer an adult, community outreach course on the Civil War in North Carolina, she couldn’t have imagined the storm of political correctness she was setting into motion and the nightmare it would bring. The course was almost finished, and the students were enjoying it immensely, when a controversy seeking reporter for the News & Record of Greensboro, who had entered the class without permission, clashed with instructors and students and wrote an article falsely claiming that the course was teaching that slaves in the South were happy. Picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted worldwide, the article brought a barrage of vituperative news coverage and vilification to the college. Although students, instructors and college officials protested that the newspaper’s sensational claims never happened, News & Record editors insisted that its articles were fair and accurate even after evidence indicated otherwise. The articles resulted in branding the college, students and instructors as racist, and brought about an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the cancellation of the course. In this engrossing, moving, and frightening account, national award winning journalist and New York Times 1 bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe takes readers into the class to show what actually happened and behind the scenes as college officials, students, and instructors attempted to deal with the crisis. But more than that, it tells the story of an honorable man, Jack Perdue, the course instructor, a local historian and preservationist, who died during the controversy. A man whom family, friends and students believe was destroyed by the news media. Death By Journalism?? raises important questions about free speech, academic freedom, political correctness, racial politics, and integrity of the news media. It should be required reading for journalism students.

Fire in the Belly

When Bill Pratt and Powell Seymour got laid off from their technology jobs in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1991, they had no idea that they were about to become leaders of a revolution in electronic communications. They did know that they wanted to start their own company, although they had no means to fund it. They asked their friend Jerry Neal to leave his job at the same company and join them to raise money and market their products. Those products numbered only seven at the time, and they could fit in a small matchbox with plenty of room to spare. But they were unlike any other products. Bill Pratt had designed the first radio frequency integrated circuits, the semiconductor chips that would make the cell phone phenomenon possible. Within a year of starting the company, Pratt had designed another chip, the first power amplifier using an exotic technology that many considered unreliable and impossible to commercialize. Although the chip failed at first, it became a company builder. Now more than half of the cell phones made in the world contain power amplifiers made by RF Micro Devices of Greensboro, the world’s leading supplier. The company has plants and offices around the world, and has broadened its reach into every aspect of wireless electronic communications. Jerry Neal’s revealing, entertaining, often funny account of how this came about is much more than a story of one company’s beginnings. It’s a wild ride through the technology boom of the 1990s, at the peak of which, just nine years after its founding, RF Micro Devices had a market value of $16 billion, twice that of its technology partner, the huge, long established defense contractor TRW. Fire in the Belly should be a handbook for entrepreneurs and a textbook for college business majors.

Built On a Rock

Jerry Neal’s parents met as teenagers on a big flat rock by a rutted, red dirt road in Randolph County, N.C. Both lived on small Depression era farms, and the rock became their refuge, a symbol of their bond. After they married and built their own small home nearby, the rock became a flagstone of their memories.

Neal grew up in a closely knit extended family, his values instilled by their Quaker faith, hard work and commitment to the land on which they had lived for generations. Those values guided him to success in business and to a dream of his own. In 2001, on land at the spot where his parents met, he and his wife, Linda, began construction of Linbrook Hall, a Greek Classical Revival mansion that is to be a center of giving, a place for important conferences and charitable events. Completed in 2004, its first event in November raised more than $50,000 for Victory Junction Gang Camp for chronically ill children.

Jerry Neal’s parents didn’t live to see Linbrook Hall. But the rock on which they met now stands in its garden, a monument to family, faith, and place.