Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: Christmas Stalkings, ed. Charlotte MacLeod

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Short Story Wednesday: Christmas Stalkings, ed. Ch...:   Christmas Stalkings , published in 1991, was the second Christmas short story anthology edited by Charlotte MacLeod. All of the stories in...

Jungle Red Writers: Remembering Margaret Maron

Jungle Red Writers: Remembering Margaret Maron: HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, such a bright light extinguished in mystery world. The incomparable Margaret Maron. I’ll wager there’s not a reade...

Bitter Tea and Mystery Review: Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Shooting at Loons: Margaret Maron: Earlier this month I revisited a series that I had tried in 2003 but never returned to. I found the third book in the series, Shooting at Lo...

Bitter Tea and Mystery Review: Death in Blue Folders by Margaret Maron

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Death in Blue Folders: Margaret Maron: I usually write a post mid-week for the Friday's Forgotten Books meme originated by Patricia Abbott at her blog pattinase and now host...

FFB Review: BOOTLEGGER’S DAUGHTER (1992) by Margaret Maron -- Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Barry is back to save FFB here on the blog this week. Make sure you check out the full list at Patti Abbott’s blog.

BOOTLEGGER’S DAUGHTER (1992) by Margaret Maron

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

In my teens I discovered Ross Macdonald, an author whom I instantly admired and whose works I began accumulating.  Among them was The Wycherly Woman. But after starting to read it, I quit after three or four chapters, thinking it a work atypically and unaccountably dull from this author, but also figuring that I’d give it another shot sometime in the future.  The future was about a year or so later. That time around the novel proved as irresistible as Macdonald’s previous Lew Archer stories long and short had been, and I devoured it. The experience made me realize that mood and expectation almost invariably determine how I respond to reading matter. I’m guessing that many other readers, likely a majority, react the same way, whether to leisure or required material. 

“Okay, but this isn’t a review of The Wycherly Woman,” you say; “it concerns Bootlegger’s Daughter. What’s the connection?”

Bootlegger’s Daughter is the first in a series of mystery novels starring first-person narrator Deborah Knott, the partner of a small law firm in the town of Dobbs, North Carolina, located in the fictional county of Colleton. The book was enthusiastically recommended to me years ago by a former college English instructor who at one point worked for a used-book store and who knew I’m a mystery fan. I bought a paperback copy but, until just recently as of this writing (early August 2017), it languished on a shelf.

The novel’s basic premise concerns Deborah Knott being approached by eighteen-year-old Gayle Whitehead, for whom she babysat when Gayle was a child, and asked to look into the brutal murder of Gayle’s mother Janie when Gayle was three months old. My problem with it is that although this request occurs fairly early in the story, it isn’t until halfway or a little further through that Deborah’s investigation really begins. In between she’s campaigning for a local judgeship. Amid descriptions of her activities at various political rallies, the reader is introduced to a number of personalities who are competing for the same position as well as to various residents of Dobbs and surrounding communities, relatively few of whom have anything to do with the mystery. This is a novel which could benefit from a cast-of-characters list­­­­­­, one confined to people essential to the crux of the story.

Just prior to Chapter Nine, I debated about whether to continue reading or quit. As this review makes obvious, I kept going, which led to a satisfying,­ albeit somewhat predictable conclusion, though the trip was a bit more sluggish than I’d have liked. But that’s where mood and expectation come into play. I was in the mood for a novel in which the detection element was predominant, and my expectation was that Bootlegger’s Daughter would deliver one longer than that in a novelette.

The first four pages of the Warner Books/Mysterious Press paperback edition contain brief enthusiastic excerpts from a multitude of newspaper and author blurbs, and other reviews. Several of them praise the novel by alluding to authors like Faulkner, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee, as well as to mystery writers P.D. James, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. I must reluctantly admit to not having read the mystery writers. As far as the others are concerned, I can sort of understand why reviewers mentioned them, but based on this work I wouldn’t put Margaret Maron in quite the same league. Nevertheless, she does a very good job of conveying a sense of character, place, and cultural climate in lucid prose.

With the admonition that there are a few (and I mean only a few) instances of the N-word and the F-bomb, which might discourage some from reading it, I can recommend Bootlegger’s Daughter to those expecting ­and being in the mood for­ a tale which combines modern realistic mystery with a mainstream/literary approach.   

© 2017 Barry Ergang

Some of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.com

Guest Author Reviewer Kaye George and "Designated Daughters" by Margaret Maron

Please welcome author Kaye George to the blog. She offers her thoughts on Designated Daughters by Margaret Maron in a review originally written for Suspense Magazine. After you read her first of what hopefully will be many posts here make sure you go check out her website at http://kayegeorge.com/

Designated Daughters by Margaret Maron

It’s great to be back in Colleton County, North Carolina, with the Knott family.

Miss Rachel, in no pain and expected to pass over soon, is visited by flocks of family members, eager to see her one last time. She’s resting quietly, until she perks up and starts talking a blue streak. Some of what she says is unintelligible, unless you know what she’s referring to. Finally, exhausted, she stops talking and the family goes to get some supper while the aide freshens up the sheets.

Very soon after that, Aunt Rachel is dead, but not of natural causes. Someone smothered her with a pillow.

It’s up to The Honorable Deborah Knott to sort through her tangled family and the other assorted people who were at Rachel’s bedside when she was rattling on about old scandals, to see which one of them felt compelling to stop Rachel from talking. She talks with all of them, dredging up more than one old secret. She and her husband, Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant, look into Rachel’s minister, her neighboring doctor, and others. She eventually finds out about the Designated Daughters, women who care for the elderly, sometimes even when they aren’t family members. Rachel’s daughter was one of these. Deborah knows it’s one of Rachel’s final words that brought about her death, but which one?

Great puzzler with the usual crowded cast of family members. Don’t worry, a family tree is provided.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Death in the Time of Ice for Suspense Magazine