Bootlegger’s Daughter

Boolegger’s Daughter

Margaret Maron

Mysterious Press, New York

1992

264 pages

This is the first novel in a series.  Margaret Maron had already published eight whodunits when she started this series set in her childhood home of North  Carolina.

Structurally, this is a “cold case” story.  The detective, Deborah Knott, is an attorney in her home of Colleton County,  North Carolina.  She is approached by Gayle Whitehead.  Deborah had been her babysitter many years before.  Gayle’s mother had been killed when Gayle was three month’s old, and Gayle wants Deborah to look into the case.  Deborah agrees.

At the same time,  she decides to run for a county judgeship, basically because the racist nature of the county court system.

The classic detective is a loner.  Deborah Knott is definitely not.  She is the twelfth child, and only daughter of the county’s most notorious bootlegger.  She is junior partner in a small legal practice with two of her relatives.  She lives with an aunt and uncle.  Loneliness for her isn’t a danger,  it’s an accomplishment

So Deborah investigates the murder while running for office.  Each endeavor informs the other.  She gets clues at campaign events, and she picks up endorsements in the course of her investigation.  And she finds, as  “cold case” stories, that things aren’t as they seem to be, and never were.

This is a very good whodunit.  The two endeavors allow for a broad spectrum of scenes and a variety of activities.

Maron is a good writer.  Here she paints a scene of an abandoned gristmill.

“These day, Virginia creeper and honeysuckle fight it out in the dooryard with blackberry brambles and poison ivy.  Hunters and anglers may shelter beneath its rusty tin roof from unexpected thunderstorms, teenage lovers may park in the overgrown lane on warm moonlit nights, but for years the mill has sat alone out there in the woods, tenanted by the coons and foxes that den beneath its stone walls.”

That’s pretty clean and evocative for two sentences.

But.

I wish that just once, a female mystery writer would leave out the scene where the heroine does something stupid, is placed in mortal danger, and is rescued by some man.  It’s trite and not convincing.

These days,  Margaret Maron can start a new Deborah Knott novel confident that it will get on the best seller lists and at least be considered for awards.  This book is one of the reasons why.