Home Fires (Deborah Knott Mysteries)
If there's truly such a thing as an American "cozy,"  Margaret Maron's novels of the contemporary South fit the bill. Not that Deborah  Knott, the sexy, smart young district court judge whose extended family of 10  siblings, a curmudgeonly father who used to be a moonshiner, and  uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces too numerous to count, bears any  resemblance to the maiden ladies of that beloved British genre. But like her  English counterparts, Maron eschews blood and gore, and concentrates  instead on manners, mores, and motives. And she has few equals on either side  of the Atlantic; she weaves telling portraits of ordinary people coping with out-of-the-ordinary circumstances, often in less than  a couple of sentences, and tells the whole history of a landscape and a way  of life in one short paragraph. In this tradition,Home Firesdelineates the remnants of prejudice that linger like an indelible  stain on the fabric of race relations in mostly rural Colleton County,  North Carolina. When Deborah's family calls on her to help her teenage  nephew, who's accused of vandalizing a family cemetery with racial  epithets and hate slogans, she butts heads with an angry, aggressive, black  female D.A., a charismatic preacher, and an activist and former Black Panther  whose closet full of skeletons seems linked to the church arsons. As the  plot unfolds, Maron brings the New South into focus, illuminating not  only its physical beauty and the complexity of its inhabitants but also the  changes and problems caused by integration. Deborah is a steel magnolia  whose own fires smolder sexily in scenes with Kidd, her lover, and whose own  values and beliefs come in for a penetrating reexamination in this newest  in the popular series from Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity  Award-winning author Maron.--Jane Adams--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.