Hard Row

Migrant worker exploitation and murder combine to make Judge Deborah Knott's latest adventure exciting and a bit gruesome. Pieces of a local farm owner are showing up in the North Carolina countryside. Knott has a new stepchild, a busy calendar, and many relatives, but she still finds time to help her lawman husband. C.J. Critt's upbeat tone reflects the Judge's overall cheerfulness. This is a complicated story with multiple plot lines, characters, points of view, and even advice from an 1890 farmers' journal. It might be easy for a narrator to lose its continuity, but Critt holds the vocal reins tightly. She injects the story with local color and individualizes characters with regard to their age, gender, personality, and ethnicity. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

July 9, 2007
Fans of Edgar-winner Maron’s reliably pleasing Deborah Knott series will be glad to see the North Carolina judge back on the bench in this intriguing 13th mystery (after 2006’s Winter’s Child
). Deborah has to decide a high-stakes divorce case with a no-show husband as well as preside over a growing caseload involving migrant workers pitted against locals. Meanwhile, body parts begin to appear in rural Colleton County that turn out to belong to Buck Harris, a farmer known for his exploitation of cheap immigrant labor who happens to be Deborah’s missing divorce plaintiff. When Knott’s new husband, sheriff’s deputy Dwight Bryant, investigates the immigrants living on the Harris farm, he uncovers a sequence of events that suggest something much more damaging than the sheer indifference the victim had shown to his workers. As Deborah adjusts to becoming the stepmother of Dwight’s motherless eight-year-old son, Cal, her large extended family debates the future of their own family farm. Readers will eagerly await further developments in the next book.