Ballard complicates the generally heartwarming tone of her gently nostalgic mysteries (Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause,...
Miss Dimple hunts a killer and teaches her town a lesson.
Amid the fear and deprivation of World War II, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick joins the search party in her small Georgia town to look for one of her students. She finds Peggy Ashcroft, who is very ill, only as darkness falls. A friendly dog guides her to the cabin of reclusive artist Mae Martha Hawthorne and her companion, Suzy, who’s been helping her recover from a leg injury. Their care helps the child survive until the phoneless home can get word to the doctor. But there’s no happy ending yet, for a few days later, a frantic call from Suzy brings Miss Dimple and her friends Charlie, Virginia and Annie rushing to the cabin, where they find Mae Martha dead from a blow to the head. The police suspect Suzy, who has disappeared, but Miss Dimple thinks the gentle, caring girl’s Japanese ancestry has sent her into hiding. When the desperate Suzy calls again, the ladies hide her in Virginia’s house while they search for the real killer. Mae Martha’s valuable painting may have provided a motive for murder, and although both her nephews seem to have loved her dearly, they must join her handyman and several neighbors as suspects. While some townsfolk denounce Suzy as a Japanese spy and a murderer, Miss Dimple and her friends continue the search for the truth. When the sleuths find Mae Martha’s handyman dead, they realize that they’d better solve the crimes quickly, as their own lives may be in danger.
Ballard complicates the generally heartwarming tone of her gently nostalgic mysteries (Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause, 2011, etc.) by dramatizing a shameful episode in the country’s history.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00967-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to...
Rookie Twelve Sleep County Game Warden Joe Pickett’s not much of a shot, and he’s been looking like a goat ever since poacher Ote Keeley got the drop on him with his own gun during a routine arrest. But at least he’s doing better than Ote, who’s turned up dead on the woodpile outside Joe’s house. Joe’s search in Crazy Woman Creek canyon for the two outfitters and guides Ote was most recently partnered with ends happily, though violently, and suddenly Joe is the man of the hour. Longtime County Sheriff Bud Barnum nervously asks Joe’s assurance that he’s not going to support neighboring game warden Wacey Hedeman’s challenge in the upcoming election; trophy wife Aimee Kensinger, who really likes men in uniforms, invites Joe’s family to housesit her palatial digs for three weeks; and wily Vern Dunnegan, Joe’s predecessor, wants Joe to join him in pulling down big bucks from InterWest resources, the fat-cat corporation for whose gas pipeline Vern’s lining up local support. All this good news is only a front, of course, for a monstrous assault on Joe’s livelihood, his integrity, and his family—and incidentally on an inoffensive species long assumed extinct. In response, Joe promises one of the bad guys that “things are going to get real western,” and that’s exactly what happens in the satisfyingly action-filled climax.
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to imagine tourism-marketing exec Box topping his debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14748-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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