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Summary
Summary
When Judge Deborah Knott is summoned to her ailing Aunt Rachel's bedside, she assumes the worst. Thankfully when she arrives at the hospice center she learns that Rachel hasn't passed; in fact, the dying woman is awake. Surrounded by her children, her extended family, and what seems like half of Colleton County, a semi-conscious Rachel breaks weeks of pained silence with snippets of stories as randomly pieced together as a well-worn patchwork quilt. But the Knott family's joy quickly gives way to shock: less than an hour later, Aunt Rachel is found dead in her bed, smothered with a pillow.
Who would kill a woman on her deathbed? Was it an act of mercy, or murder? As Deborah and her husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, investigate they cross paths with an unlikely set of suspects: Rachel's longtime minister; her neighbor, the respected local doctor; the friendly single father who often sought her advice; and perhaps the most puzzling party of all, the Designated Daughters, a support group for caregivers that Rachel's own daughter belongs to.
Soon Deborah and Dwight realize that the key to solving this case is hidden in Rachel's mysterious final words. Her mixed-up memories harbored a dark secret-a secret that someone close to them is determined to bury forever.
Author Notes
Margaret Maron grew up in rural North Carolina. She attended college for two years before a summer job at the Pentagon led to marriage, a tour of duty in Italy, than several years in Brooklyn, New York before moving back to North Carolina. She is the author of the Sigrid Harald Mystery series, the Deborah Knott Mystery series, Bloody Kin, and Last Lessons of Summer. Bootlegger's Daughter won the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony and Macavity Awards for Best Mystery in 1992. "Up Jumps the Devil" won the 1996 "Best Novel" Agatha award. "High Country Fall" was nominated for an Agatha Award in 2004 and also picked up a Macavity nomination the following year. "Three-Day Town" won the 2011 Agatha Award for "Best Novel". "Long Upon the Land" won the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel of 2015.Margaret is a founding member and past president of sisters in Crime and of the American Crime Writer's League; She is a director on the national board for Mystery Writers of America.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In MWA Grand Master Maron's outstanding 19th mystery featuring judge Deborah Knott of North Carolina's Colleton County (after 2012's The Buzzard Table), Deborah's elderly aunt, Rachel Morton, lies near death in a hospice. Rachel attracts a crowd of friends and relatives as she talks of "babies, fires, and unpaid debts, of someone who beat his wife and of cowbirds and vegetables and broken jars." A distraction allows a killer enough time to slip into Rachel's room and smother her with a pillow, thus ending her ramblings, which apparently concealed deadly secrets. Unraveling those secrets-some 60 years old-is a slow, difficult process with lots of suspects among friends and family. Maron achieves a delicate balance as she explores differences between mistakes, sins, and crimes, and shows that justice is not always arrived at by conventional means. Humor (e.g., Deborah outfoxes an unscrupulous auctioneer) and social issues (e.g., the difficult role of caregivers to the elderly) add to the warmth of a large family with all its foibles, squabbles, and quirks. Five-city author tour. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The unlikely murder of an elderly relative sends a judge and her husband scurrying to investigate family history in order to find out who stands to gain from an old woman's death. When her cousin Sally Crenshaw shows up in her courtroom unexpectedly, Judge Deborah Knott assumes that her father's sister Rachel has finally passed. Just the opposite is true. Aunt Rachel seems to be back from the brink and has been telling tales of times past. The extended family gathers around to listen and spend time with her, though they leave her to rest when she drifts off to sleep. Given her sudden, miraculous recovery, the family is shocked when they learn that Aunt Rachel died just 40 minutes after they left her to sleep. They're even more shocked when it appears that she's been murdered. Who would kill a woman already so close to death? Suspecting that there must have been some secrets in the stories Aunt Rachel was sharing, Deborah encourages her husband, Dwight, a police officer, to investigate. She senses that the murder may have something to do with the death of Jacob, Aunt Rachel's beloved brother, who drowned in his 16th summer. Now Dwight has to go through Aunt Rachel's reminiscences to determine a motive for murderand it turns out there's more than one secret she spilled that some wish would've stayed hidden.Though Maron (The Buzzard Table, 2012, etc.) unearths more of Deborah's family history for long-term fans, the main story is often burdened by too many characters and their tangential relationships. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
It's 1947. The war is over, and no one in the modest English town of Lewes expects a person like Gibson to be shot in broad daylight with a military issue Luger. Just as mysterious is the unfinished letter he was writing that mentions John Madden, which brings the former Scotland Yard detective out of retirement to assist in the investigation of other killings committed with the same pistol. As he did with poor Gibson, Airth constructs carefully detailed portraits of each victim, along with the family members other authors often neglect to count as casualties. After interviewing the wife and daughter of one of the dead, a detective is reminded of London during the Blitz, with "survivors wandering the streets of the capital, white-faced as ghosts." That compassion defines Airth's memorable novels, as much as any other aspect of his work, Here, though, the plot suffers somewhat from his meticulous technique. While the police are thrashing about, conducting mostly unhelpful interviews trying to find a common cause for the murders, the reader has already figured out that the victims must have served in the same unit during the war. Not the war that has just ended but the Great War that left its "lingering curse" on everyone. Like the previous books in this almost too beautifully written series, "The Reckoning" is about the comforts of redemption and forgiveness - and the impossibility of forgetting. DEBORAH KNOTT, the kind and clever sleuth in Margaret Maron's wonderful down-home mysteries set in rural North Carolina, has a very large family - by last count, 11 brothers, their wives and children, plus untold aunts, uncles and cousins. In DESIGNATED DAUGHTERS (Grand Central, $27), practically the whole clan shows up at the hospice where Aunt Rachel has interrupted the process of dying to deliver a rambling account of all the things that have been on her wandering mind. It's quite a lovely deathbed aria, narrated in the honeyed accents of the region. But someone must have feared Aunt Rachel might divulge a buried secret because that someone creeps into her room and smothers her with a pillow. Maron knows how to adorn a solid murder mystery with plenty of ancillary entertainments. But her broader theme involves the way families flourish when they work together for the common good. While there are charming scenes of group projects like building a pond shed and assembling a bluegrass band, the clan members Maron really cherishes are those who devote themselves to caring for the elders of the family. Living saints they are, every last one of them. KURT WALLANDER will absolutely, positively and quite definitely never appear in another detective novel by Henning Mankell. But as the Swedish author explains in an afterword to Laurie Thompson's translation of an EVENT IN AUTUMN (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard, paper, $14.95), this is a story he wrote "many years ago" for a literary promotion in Holland. Later, the BBC made it into a television movie starring Kenneth Branagh. Although it doesn't have the thematic density and moral ambiguity of his better books, the narrative does capture the unsettled state of Wallander's mind toward the end of his career, when he is "pleased with his performance as a police officer," but not at all "pleased with his life as a human being." Thinking he might be happier if he had a house in the country (along with a dog and maybe even a female companion), Wallander finds himself drawn to an old farmhouse - until he finds a human hand poking out of the overgrown garden. Since the body went into the ground at least 50 years earlier, a good bit of Sweden's wartime history must be unearthed along with the bones, which leaves Wallander more depressed than he was when we met him. NO ONE WRITES noir like the French. One eloquent voice in that bleak genre belongs to Pascal Garnier, who fuses dark comedy and existential despair, and Gallic Books is publishing appropriately austere translations of a number of his novels. MOON IN A DEAD EYE (Gallic Books, paper, $12.95), translated by Emily Boyce and written in the absurdist manner of Jean Anouilh, is a takedown of the haughty residents of an exclusive retirement community. All that's needed is a caravan of Gypsies to turn these smug provincials into savage beasts. Also translated by Emily Boyce, HOW'S THE PAIN? (Gallic Books, paper, $12.95), which borrows its title from a friendly African greeting, is a deliciously dark tale about a professional hit man's last job. Too old and ill to carry out his assignment alone, Simon Marechall entices strapping young Bernard Ferrand to drive him to a town in the South of France. A simple job. But Bernard is such a sweet naïf that he gets them into one misadventure after another, all painfully funny - except for that last one.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. When Judge Deborah Knott gets a call from the convalescent home about her Aunt Rachel, she expects to hear the worst. She arrives to find her aunt awake and telling stories from her past, including some that are new to Deborah. Yet within hours Rachel is dead, and it is obvious that she was murdered. While Deborah and her husband, sheriff's deputy Dwight Bryant, investigate, her family becomes embroiled in a dispute with a dirty antiques dealer. Alternating viewpoints between Deborah and Dwight, Maron weaves family threads together with current events that leave the reader wanting to know more about the Knott family tree. VERDICT The author's 19th series outing (after The Buzzard Table) offers loyal fans a fresh look at her expansive family and community. Readers will savor the slow-paced Southern culture and layered story. Maron was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2013. [See Prepub Alert, 2/10/14.] (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.