Storm Track (7) (Deborah Knott Mystery) - Tapa dura

"Judge Deborah Knott of the Colleton County (N.C.) District Court is one of the most delightful and original of contemporary amateur detectives. The youngest of 12 children--and the only girl--she knows everyone in the county and is never shy about poking her nose in all manner of suspicious happenings. Then she sits readers down for a cosy chat about her adventures, as though they were old friends. In the series's seventh novel (Homes Fires), when promiscuous Lynn Bullock is found strangled in the Orchid Motel wearing black lace underwear, suspects include several local men as well as the deceased's attorney husband, Jason, and Deborah's womanizing cousin Reid Stephenson. But Deborah saw all of these men playing softball at the time of the murder. The judge helps investigate the crime, but soon she has to confront another killer--ferocious Hurricane Fran, fast approaching from the coast. Maron immerses the reader in the down-home, inbred world of the rural South, where intertwined family histories are common knowledge and some old-timers, like Deborah's unrepentant bootlegger father, still live by obsolete customs. Colleton County also has a growing population of black and female professionals, as well as spreading residential development to accommodate suburbanites from the coastal cities 150 miles away. One of Maron's many skills is her ability to weave into her story the social changes coming to this region with the speed of that hurricane." -- Publishers Weekly (2000)

“A witty and affectionate view of the new South—and especially, the new South’s new woman,” writes the San Diego Union-Tribune of Margaret Maron’s award-winning Deborah Knott mystery series. From its first book, Bootlegger’s Daughter, which swept every major mystery writing award, this series has been extraordinary—winning a greater audience and brilliantly evolving in content and style. Now, in the seventh book in the series, sexual tension, illicit love, and brutal murder entangle and explode in Deborah Knott’s life . . .

Hurricanes rarely make it inland as far as Colleton County, North Carolina. When they do, people remember them as events that mark an entire generation. Domestic storms, on the other hand, hit with regularity, so when the scantily clad body of a promiscuous wife is found in a motel, the murder resounds like a thunderclap through the community.

With her handsome cousin a suspect in the murder, Judge Deborah Knott soon uncovers a web of secret and illicit affairs that stretches from the African-American church community to Deborah’s own family. Then the killer strikes again, even as a real-life killer storm rages up the Carolina coast.

Mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and cleverly plotted, STORM TRACK is great, powerful fiction . . . and Margaret Maron is at her best.