Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent, Vicky Bijur. Mystery Guild main selection. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
While North Carolina's Colleton County judge Deborah Knott (Home Fires, 1988, etc.) waits for a lawyers vs. law-enforcers softball game to start, a scant half-mile away in Room 130 of the Orchid Motel, big-haired Lynn Bullock unsnaps a sheer-black stocking from a lacy garterbelt, which someone then wraps around her neck and yanks until she dies. Jason, Lynn's up-and-coming lawyer husband who thought she was off antiquing with her sister, seems to be the only man in town who didn't know his wife played around. Most of her former lovers'and her husband'have the ballgame as their alibi, but who left a tie- bar and silver pen at the crime scene? Deborah and kin will gather at her daddy's place to wait out Hurricane Fran, while at the same time married Rev. Freeman will end a true love affair as his son tracks the hurricane's movements for a science-class project and Lynn's killer busily searches for a black woman driving a white Honda Civic, who spotted him in the motel parking lot and tried a little blackmail. One more will die and another wind up in Possum Creek (its waters steadily rising) when the power cuts out, the phones go down, and nature and man go one-on-one, a hundred-year-old oak tree winning out. Maron, who can make even a dollop of mayo on a canned pear sound tasty, has created such an appealing Knott clan, from unrepentant bootlegger Kezzie on down, that readers will wish they could marry into it. For accuracy, her hurricane descriptions rival the Weather Channel's, and nobody's better at showing racial distrust and love gone awry, be they between adults or between parents and children.
Booklist Review
Maron's popular Judge Deborah Knott series stands somewhere between Hess' Maggody novels and Muller's Sharon McCone series, mixing Muller's realistic take on a female crime-solver with the rural southern ambience of the Maggody tales (minus the wacky humor). This time, the residents of Colleton County, North Carolina, must contend with dual threats: Hurricane Fran, gearing up offshore, and the presence of a nasty murderer in their midst. Lynn Bullock, known as a tramp by all except, perhaps, her husband, is strangled in a local motel, dressed for a tryst, and Deborah's cousin Reid is a top suspect. More bodies turn up as the hurricane arrives to wreak another kind of destruction on the locals. The murder plot unravels with few surprises, but the focus of the story is on the subplots, detailing interpersonal travails among Deborah's friends and family, all of whom come together at a down-home hurricane party. Maron's real subject is community, its abiding pleasures and its inevitable complexities, and this novel treats both with great sensitivity. --Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
When someone snuffs out the life of a Colleton County attorney's wife in the local motel, Detective Dwight Bryant gets the case. And since he's best pals with Judge Deborah Knott, who happens to be breaking in her new house nearby, the two gather clues in tandem. The victim's promiscuity surprises no one except her husband, so there are plenty of suspects, including a partner in the Knott family law firm. Elsewhere, a preacher's wife finds out about her husband's infidelity, while their son tracks Hurricane Fran, coming up the North Carolina coast, for his science project. A rousing combination of natural disaster and narrative creativity, this seventh novel in the Deborah Knott series is highly recommended. [Mystery Guild main selection.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
