A GREEN-EYED HURRICANE

It’s easy to understand why everyone in and around Biloxi, Mississippi, has long since lost patience with crusty Casper Perinovich. He's dour and short-tempered, a constant complainer. But private investigator Jack Delmas has a soft spot for “Mr. Cass” that no amount of latter-day crankiness can dispel. He remembers how it was when the old man laughed a lot, how it was before Cass—and all Biloxi, for that matter—had to reckon with “the malevolent green eye of Hurricane Camille.” Casper Perinovich lost his adored wife and son to that most vicious of storms and gained the kind of grudge that clings and festers. Camille was wicked, he insists, while confiding to Jack that unspecified human villainy was more culpable in his family’s death. What's evident to Jack, however, is that Mr. Cass has become a world-class hater, and that haters of his stripe make world-class enemies. So when the Perinovich house blows up with the owner inside, Jack at once suspects foul play. But whose? Well, for starters there are the junior gangsters, local breed, who've been having a fine time turning harassment into an art form. There’s also that cabal of venture capitalists who need the Perinovich land—land he’d sworn they’d get only over his dead body. And that only scratches the surface of a richly varied enemies list.

Even better than Hegwood’s pleasant debut (Big Easy Backroad, 1999). Jack Delmas is a series hero who’s lively, likable, and as distinctively southern as Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott.