Books by William Hill

Bill Hill was the city editor of The Sedalia Democrat newspaper from 1960-1965. After Bill's death in 2014, his daughter JoAnn Hill Holcomb found the manuscript her father wrote for a book about Sedalia and Scott Joplin. She meticulously transcribed the manuscript and is publishing it as as written between 1960 and 1967. It is valuable for the interview accounts he described with the original surviving ragtime composers, G. Thomas "Tom" Ireland and Arthur Marshall. Bill's notes for the manuscript were lost but he does frequently cite his sources in the text of his book."A Cradle for Ragtime" sheds light on the environment in which Joplin's classic ragtime compositions were written and on the remarkable nature of the composer's work.

Wreythville's cemetery had rested quietly beneath South Holston Lake for decades, but now a drought and receding waters have exposed an island of graves. Those coffins should have been moved when the dam was constructed, but no one, certainly not the TVA, wanted to go near such cursed ground, nor what lurked within the hidden pine boxes. Some things were best left alone. And yet, more than a half century later, a reunion of childhood friends disturbs the newly emergent graves and discover a lakebed-dwelling mansion of haunts. Where the blood brothers seek adventure, they find death, dark transformation, and a vengeful new breed of the undying. A malevolent spirit and its kindred, an ancient breed of blood drinkers, return with frightful new powers that defy the sunshine. These vampires can stalk by day to exact vengeance on those who entrapped them. Vanishings and murders plague God's Country as former nightwalkers work to reclaim Holston Valley and stalk the shadows of Bristol. Von Damme's zealots and vampires will let nothing stop them, not the eroding waters, not the forest afire, not even the glare of broad daylight. Troy, Silke, and his blood brothers must ally with the forces of darkness if they have any hope of stopping the Dawn of the Vampire.