Sharyn McCrumb has moved out of the mystery genre. Her Appalachian novels, which she now calls her "Ballad" novels started as mystery novels set in a small town in eastern Tennessee, featuring Sheriff Spencer Arrowood. She still has him make appearances in most books, but he has become a secondary character. From the beginning, she drew on folklore, folk music, and history and from the beginning she used her novels to knock down stereotypes about Appalachian hillbillies. Her stories have increasingly featured ghosts and paranormal phenomena as told within the Celtic and Appalachian traditions, and she seems to have placed herself within that story-telling tradition.

"Ghost Riders" is mainly about the Civil War as fought in western North Carolina. McCrumb tells the story in multiple, mainly first person voices. There are two historical voices based on historical figures - Zebulon Vance, North Carolina politician, and Malinda Blalock, female guerrilla. There are several modern voices adding modern perspectives on the Civil War, and its legacy of strife between families in rural Appalachia. The main story is a two-voiced historical memoir of the war. The modern story is a ghost story on the premise that Civil war re-enactors attract the ghosts of Civil War soldiers, and must be sent away. There is a side story, set in the modern time, of a detached young man who decides to hide in the woods and starve himself to death.

McCrumb has a good hand for character and dialogue. Her characters are interesting and their stories are engaging, allowing for personal versions and visions of the historical story. She does a good job of bringing history to life, as the acts of real people with real passions, caught in terrible times. She tries to avoid anachronisms, and is generally successful. Her portrait of Malinda Blalock might have been a story of a proto-feminist, and she manages to give us a flinty, stubborn, independent, practical woman rooted in her own time. She does a good job of showing how big political ideas often rationalize ambition, greed and brutality.