THE MAN WHO INSULTED SOMERSVILLE
By
A small Southern town, revealed through the caricature of stupidity, pettiness and malicious tongues, the breakdown of standards supposedly based on ancestry but actually rooted in money, and the irony of the situation which makes the story results in sage and entertaining reading. Leonard Somers dies, leaving a fortune to his nearest kin, and before his death he had planned a gargantuan revenge, a revelation of scandals within scandals, just retribution for meddlers who had driven him out of town. It is a long book -- overlong, perhaps, but for the acute and witty presentation.