Sam McGee is an author, trial lawyer and fisherman from North Carolina. His first book, Sidelines and Bloodlines, is a college football memoir written with his referee father and sportswriter brother. Cartledge Creek is his debut novel, and is inspired by his family's true Civil War story. As a teenager, Sam used to tell everyone who would listen that he would one day buy the old family homeplace back into the family. He and his wife Marci did so in 2006. That house is the site of much of what happens in Cartledge Creek. Sam and Marci live in North Carolina with children Hannah Cole and Brooks, and cats Scout and Calpurnia.