Lesa's Book Critiques: Kevin’s Corner Annex – The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright
Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mississippi. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Review: The Queen City Detective Agency: A Novel by Snowden Wright
The Queen City Detective
Agency: A Novel
by Snowden Wright is set in early 1985 in Meridian, Mississippi. Like an onion,
this book is complicated with many layers. Racism, classicism, the Dixie Mafia,
and more play major roles in this novel.
Turnip Coogan had
been facing twenty to life for capital murder when he decided to flee the jail.
One of the trustees had left a window open, due to the brutal heat, and Turnip decided
to head on out that window. He forgot that the jail was on the roof of the courthouse.
Going out that window put him outside on the roof of the building on this
blistering hot January day.
Trapped on the
roof with nowhere to run, his plight becomes a spectacle to all, and a crowd
gathers below in downtown Meridian, Mississippi. Known to all as the “Queen’s
City” things are on an economic downhill slide no matter where you stand in the
city. Being on the roof of the courthouse makes it just a little more apparent.
Turnip is also
on a downhill slide and he knows it. He knows he has been put in this trap as
he, and his well-known connections to the Dixie Mafia, have been used against
him. He is a desperate man, powerless against what is happening, and pushed to
the edge, literally and figuratively. It is no surprise when he goes off the
roof and dies seconds later as gravity finishes the job started long ago.
It is just a few
hours later when Leonora Coogan, mother of Lewis “Turnip” Coogan, reaches out
to Clemetine Baldwin, bi-racial owner of the Queen City Detective Agency to get
the people who killed her son.
The next day, she
and her white partner, Dixon Hicks, drive to Lenora Coogan’s trailer to discuss
the situation. By now, everybody for 100 miles around has seen the video of her
son crashing to the sidewalk from the roof of the courthouse. She strongly believes
that he did not jump to his death.
She is sure he
was killed because the Dixie Mafia wanted to silence him for what he knew and might
say as he faced a possible murder conviction. While she doesn’t know specifics
about what her son did for them, she is sure he did some stuff and was important
to them, and that they did not want him talking about any of it.
While Clem knows
that the Dixie Mafia is blamed for anything and everything, she also knows that
they sort of exist and are ruthless at times. Mom had no idea what her son did
for them and, honestly, did not want to know as she got some good stuff out of
his work. That pipeline is cutoff with her son’s death so that factors in,
without a doubt, on her request for help now. But she is grieving and needs
help, can pay, and despite her subtle and not so subtle racism, Clem agrees to
take the case. Afterall, the racism is nothing new and Clem as decades of
dealing with it as she was born and raised here and what Lenora is saying is the
usual stuff.
What follows is
a complicated novel where some things, like allegiance to the Confederacy, are
proudly displayed, and other things, such as drug use and sexual favors in the
jail, are hidden from prying eyes. A complicated crime fiction read, the case
and those involved, go through a lot of twists and turns in a book that is well
worth your time.
One hopes that another
book in this series is coming as this one was very good and sets a strong
foundation for a possible series.
For another take
on the book, make sure you read Lesa Holstine’s August 2024 review.
Amazon
Associates Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4hyiS3T
My ARC reading copy came from the publisher, Harper Collins, through NetGalley last summer, with no expectation of a review.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2025
Tuesday, November 06, 2018
Guest Reviewer Larry W. Chavis: "I Have Nothing to Say.' (The Reckoning by John Grisham)
Well,
it has been quite awhile, but Larry W. Chavis is finally back on the blog today
with another review. After you read the below regarding the new one by John
Grisham, make sure you go check out his review of the 2016 Bouchercon Anthology,
Blood
on the Bayou. I keep telling Larry he is good at this reviewing thing
and ought to keep at it. I hope he does.
"I
Have Nothing to Say.'
The Reckoning by
John Grisham
New York, Doubleday
October 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54415-3 (hardcover)
978-0-385-54416-0 (ebook)
Reviewed by Larry W. Chavis
At the end of 1945, Pete Banning
returned home to the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, a bona fide war
hero. Captured by the Japanese forces who had forced the American and Filipino
defenders, starving and with no hope of reinforcement, to surrender, Pete
survived the horrors of the Bataan Death March, and the even-more-unspeakable nightmares
of prison camp, to escape and fight for three years as a guerilla in the
mountains of Luzon. His family, notified after the fall of the Philippines of
his missing-and-presumed-dead status, ecstatically welcomed him home to his
ancestral farmlands. A happy ending for everyone.
Until the chilly morning of October 9,
1946, when Pete Banning rose early, walked to his sister's neighboring acreage
to have breakfast with her, then calmly drove into Clanton, strode into the Methodist
preacher's office, that of his friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell, and shot him
three times, twice in the chest and once in the head. Exiting the pastor's
study, Banning told the church caretaker to fetch the sheriff, and then drove
home to await his arrest. To the sheriff, to his attorney, to his family,
Banning made one statement: "I have nothing to say."
The first chapter of John Grisham's
latest book sets the stage for what may be his most perplexing novel yet. Not
that the underlying motive is so perplexing—in fact, when it is revealed in the
final pages, it may be a bit of a let-down—but that Pete Banning is not only
willing to commit murder and set loose an avalanche of uncertain and possibly
dire consequences on his family, the victim's family, his farm hands and their
families, even all of Ford County, without uttering so much as a syllable of
the reason for it. Pete's obstinate refusal to speak could, perhaps, be viewed
as the actions of principled character acting on his principles. It could also
be taken as the narcissistic action of a man who will unleash, at the very least,
waves of anxiety and fear on those closest to him with never a care for what he
is doing to them. The reader is left to determine which, and it is not so easy
to do.
Being a John Grisham book, race and the
legal system play prominent roles, the legal system's corruptible and very
flawed processes on display, the racial inequities present in 1946 Mississippi
differing in degree, if not so much in kind, from those that still plague
society. There are two trials in the book, criminal and civil, written with
Grisham's ability to highlight a system that, like Diogenes, seeks for truth
and honesty. One is left to wonder whether and how often these things are
found. The Reckoning is worth reading and is a book to make one think.
It is not a book to make one happy.
Larry W. Chavis ©2018
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