Storm Track - Hardcover

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

" 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."