Storm Track

In her latest adventure, North Carolina Judge Deborah Knott is confronted with a vicious motel murder and an approaching hurricane. She solves one and weathers the other, but not before sundry friends and relatives get involved. C.J. Critt, who has previous experience with this series, has Judge Knott down cold. If her accent isn't Southern, her pace is. Good-humored and sociable, not much, except the affair of Knott's friend Cyl, seems to get to her. Some characters are voiced, some not. While not as emotionally involving or suspenseful as some audio mysteries, this is enjoyable all the same. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

April 17, 2000
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.