Carnal Innocence

Concert violinist Caroline Waverly hopes to recover from a wounded heart and exhausted psyche, but instead she encounters murder, mayhem, and true love in Innocence, Mississippi. Tom Stechschulte perfectly captures the sweet, slow rhythms of the small Southern town, spicing his honey with a little cayenne. His characters receive varying degrees of effort, depending on their relative importance to the story. Stechschulte's finest performance is Caroline's love interest, Tucker Longstreet. Tucker's voice, dark molasses, deep, slow and rich, makes the female listener want to crawl right in and never leave. Delicious. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

December 2, 1991
Roberts ( Genuine Lies ) plunks a pair of likable lovers into an equally likable rural Southern community; she then keeps the story from turning sweeter than blackstrap molasses by setting loose a serial killer. World-class violinist Caroline Waverly, recovering from a breakdown and an affair gone bad, arrives at her grandparents' house in Innocence, Miss., looking for peace and quiet; what she discovers is the naked, mutilated corpse of Edda Lou Hatinger. Only days earlier, Edda Lou had thrilled local gossips by publicly blowing up at Tucker Longstreet: he wanted out of their affair; she wanted marriage. Edda Lou is the third woman stabbed to death recently, so local police call in Matthew Burns, a federal investigator who specializes in tracking serial killers. In the meantime, Tucker decides to be right neighborly to Caroline, and after her initial resistance crumbles, she responds to his Southern charm. Tucker is on Matthew's list of suspects, and soon a fourth dead woman is found on the Longstreet family property. Caroline, too, faces the knife as she is drawn into a confrontation in which she learns who is behind the deaths.