Amazon.com
When it comes to the weaving of tangled webs, you'll find none finer nor more deceptive than those on the loom of Margaret Maron's Storm Track, the seventh entry in her critically acclaimed Judge Deborah Knott mystery series.
Colleton County, North Carolina, is home to Judge Knott, her moonshining daddy (the series opener, 1992's Bootlegger's Daughter, swept the Edgar Allen Poe, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards in unprecedented fashion), and more brothers and cousins than hairs on a big dog's back. Likable young lawyer Jason Bullock lives there too, as does his lovely and--unbeknownst to him--extraordinarily unfaithful wife--an awkward situation all around, which turns even more so when she turns up dead in a local motel, wearing little more than whimsy and a wink:
"Who would kill her, Reid?"
"Hell, I don't know. Usually you'd say the husband, but Bullock was on the ball field, right? Millard King, too."
"She slept with Millard King? When?"
He shrugged. "Before me, after me, during me--I don't keep tabs."
Clues abound, suspects emerge, and chief among them is the judge's cousin, Reid; a cad, certainly, but a killer? Judge Knott thinks not and sets out to prove it, as the body count rises and Hurricane Fran commences to lower the boom.
A native North Carolinian, Maron opens a window onto the New South by concerning herself more with her multilayered characters and their intertwined lives than with overstyled prose or plot contrivances. An altogether satisfying mystery, Storm Track will surely propel readers straight through this series and into the prolific Maron's other series featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD. --Michael Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
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.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
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.] Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Beliefnet
Maron gets more than just the accents right. The Knott booksoffer one of the most even-handed portrayals of Southern religion you'll find anywhere in fiction today. Churchgoing is as central to her evocation of Southern life as the iced tea that big-haired women are constantly pouring. Colleton County believes, but the citizenry's faith is quiet. Maron never settles for caricature: Colletonites are neither fanatical evangelicals nor the indifferent mainliners that sociologists would have you believe fill America's churches. Deborah, a District Court judge, is a Southern Baptist, but a feminist and a Democrat too, who goes to church to pray and to press the flesh. "Election day was still two months away ... Nevertheless, I continued to hit as many churches as I could every Sunday." (Beliefnet, May 2000)
From Booklist
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
Book Description
" 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. But when the scantily clad body of a promiscuous wife is found in a motel, the killing resounds like a thunderclap through the community. With her handsome cousin a suspect in the murder, Judge Deborah Knott gets personally involved in the case. She soon uncovers a web of secret and illicit affairs that stretches from the African-American church community to Deborah's own family. Then the murderer strikes again, even as a real-life killer storm rages up the Carolina coast. Hurricane Fran, bearing powers that can alter the landscape forever, will deliver a revelation to Deborah Knott about those closest to her-and a justice greater than man's own. Mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and cleverly plotted with surprises and twists, STORM TRACK is great, powerful fiction...and Margaret Maron at her best."
Download Description
Violent storms often hit Colleton County, North Carolina, but when a local attorney's promiscuous wife is killed, the murder blows the lids off more homes than last year's hurricane. As the victim's numerous lovers--including a handsome cousin of Judge Deborah Knott--scurry for cover stories, the judge begins her own investigation. What she finds is a tangled web of extramarital affairs and secrets linking half the county . . . while a massive hurricane rages up the Carolina coast and a very real human killer prepares to strike again.
About the Author
" MARGARET MARON grew up on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, but for many years lived in Brooklyn, New York. When she returned to her North Carolina roots with her artist-husband, Joe, she began a series based on her own background and went on to write Bootlegger's Daughter, a Washington Post bestseller and winner of the major mystery awards for 1993. Her next Deborah Knott novel, Southern Discomfort, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel; Shooting at Loons, which followed, received Agatha and Anthony award nominations, and Up Jumps the Devil won the Agatha for Best Novel of 1996."
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