THE WISDOM OF SERPENTS

Civil-rights lawyer Nate Rosen (The Love That Kills, 1991), called by his old friend Jesse Compton to Earlyville, Tennessee, to defend snake-handling Rev. Gideon McCrae after a rattler bites Holiness Church congregant Lemuel Banks, takes an unlikely detour when Lem recovers from the bite (and Nate finds a foolproof defense for McCrae)--but furniture king Ben Hobbes, disapproving old husband of childlike congregant Claire Hobbes, gets poisoned with the strychnine the Holiness Church had been sipping. As Jesse finds himself falling heavily for McCrae's daughter Bathsheba and her father's Bible-thumping brand of religion, Nate tangles with the Claire-hating Hobbes family, the police, a pugnacious private eye, and a warmhearted Jewish palm-reader before two more homicides bring him up against answers he'd rather not know. Don't be fooled by sensitive Nate's low profile: Levitsky is already turning out some of the strongest detective fiction since Ross Macdonald.