The Buzzard Table

August 20, 2012
In Maron's intriguing 18th Deborah Knott mystery, the North Carolina judge teams with the author's other series lead, NYPD homicide detective Sigrid Harald, as she did in 2011's Agatha-winning Three-Day Town. When Sigrid and her mother, photojournalist Anne Lattimore Harald, travel to Cotton Grove, N.C., to visit Sigrid's ailing grandmother, Deborah enlists Anne to help a young photographer, Jeremy Harper, who has been sentenced for trespassing after he attempted to photograph CIA "rendition flights" from the Colleton County airstrip. Meanwhile, the disappearance of promiscuous realtor Rebecca Jowett, the strange activities of British ornithologist Martin Crawford (who's studying turkey vultures), and the murder of a pilot staying at a local hotel provide plenty of investigative grist for Deborah's police officer husband, Dwight Bryant, as well as for Sigrid. Maron successfully combines a look at family foibles and relationships with a series of moral choices that challenge the characters' sense of law and justice. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary.

October 1, 2012
Every family has secrets. Some are even worth telling. Deborah Knott never admitted to her husband, Dwight, how she got her judgeship. Dwight never told her what happened in Germany when he was a Company man. And his son, Cal, fessed up to Deborah that he wanted to be adopted only after a pal ratted him out and she confronted him about it. But these little evasions pale in comparison to the big one that's motivated Martin Crawford to come to Colleton County, N.C., and settle in a tenant house owned by his ailing aunt, who's marshaling all her remaining Southern charm to entertain two other visiting relatives, NYPD Lt. Sigrid Harald and her mother, Anne, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist. Because Martin spends most of his time taking pictures of vultures--at least, that's what he says--he happens to be in the vicinity of the trash site where someone has dumped an all too promiscuous realtor. He also happens to be nearby when teenager Jeremy Harper is bashed into a coma. And unfortunately for Martin, he happens to have followed the vultures to the local airstrip, where he may have entered a pilot's motel room and snapped his neck. Is Martin responsible for all the mayhem, or are the attacks and murders unrelated? Sheriff's Deputy Dwight, with an assist from Sigrid, a memory that resurfaces for Anne and an alibi that disintegrates, finally assigns the right motives--jealousy and revenge--to the right persons, discomfiting a philandering husband and unsettling the FBI and the CIA. Maron (Three-Day Town, 2011, etc.) adroitly melds ugly American (open) government secrets with classic whodunit intrigue and stirs the pot by itemizing domestic travails that will touch readers' hearts.

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November 1, 2012

This time NYPD Lt. Sigrid Herald is on Deborah and Dwight's home turf when a murdered ornithologist is revealed to have unexpected connections to 1990s Somalia. Number 18 (after Three-Day Town) for this series favorite.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
In the eighteenth Deborah Knott mystery, the North Carolina judge once again appears with Maron's other series lead, New York police detective Sigrid Harald, just as in Three-Day Town (2011). Sigrid has come to Cotton Grove with her award-winning photographer mother, Anne Lattimore Harald, to visit Sigrid's ailing grandmother. A passionate young protester arrested for attempting to photograph CIA flights out of the local Colleton County airport, a secretive ornithologist, and a promiscuous local realtor bludgeoned to death in one of her properties combine to keep the small-town judge and her sheriff husband, Dwight Bryant, hopping. When a pilot is murdered, and the FBI takes over the investigation, Sigrid offers her able assistance to Dwight to figure out exactly what international intrigue is taking place right in his own backyard. As always, Maron skillfully layers an absorbing plot with the doings of Deborah's large extended family and the domestic details of their semirural lifestyle. In addition, the contrast between Deborah, who is warm and caring, and Sigrid, who is reserved and cerebral, gives Maron's tale added depth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)