When it comes to the weaving of tangled webs, you'll find none finer nor more deceptive than those on the loom of Margaret Maron's Storm Track, the seventh entry in her critically acclaimed Judge Deborah Knott mystery series.

Colleton County, North Carolina, is home to Judge Knott, her moonshining daddy (the series opener, 1992's Bootlegger's Daughter, swept the Edgar Allen Poe, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards in unprecedented fashion), and more brothers and cousins than hairs on a big dog's back. Likable young lawyer Jason Bullock lives there too, as does his lovely and--unbeknownst to him--extraordinarily unfaithful wife--an awkward situation all around, which turns even more so when she turns up dead in a local motel, wearing little more than whimsy and a wink:

"Who would kill her, Reid?"

"Hell, I don't know. Usually you'd say the husband, but Bullock was on the ball field, right? Millard King, too."

"She slept with Millard King? When?"

He shrugged. "Before me, after me, during me--I don't keep tabs."

Clues abound, suspects emerge, and chief among them is the judge's cousin, Reid; a cad, certainly, but a killer? Judge Knott thinks not and sets out to prove it, as the body count rises and Hurricane Fran commences to lower the boom.

A native North Carolinian, Maron opens a window onto the New South by concerning herself more with her multilayered characters and their intertwined lives than with overstyled prose or plot contrivances. An altogether satisfying mystery, Storm Track will surely propel readers straight through this series and into the prolific Maron's other series featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD. --Michael Hudson


From Publishers Weekly
Judge Deborah Knott of the Colleton County (N.C.) District Court is one of the most delightful and original of contemporary amateur detectives. The youngest of 12 children--and the only girl--she knows everyone in the county and is never shy about poking her nose in all manner of suspicious happenings. Then she sits readers down for a cosy chat about her adventures, as though they were old friends. In the series's seventh novel (Homes Fires), when promiscuous Lynn Bullock is found strangled in the Orchid Motel wearing black lace underwear, suspects include several local men as well as the deceased's attorney husband, Jason, and Deborah's womanizing cousin Reid Stephenson. But Deborah saw all of these men playing softball at the time of the murder. The judge helps investigate the crime, but soon she has to confront another killer--ferocious Hurricane Fran, fast approaching from the coast. Maron immerses the reader in the down-home, inbred world of the rural South, where intertwined family histories are common knowledge and some old-timers, like Deborah's unrepentant bootlegger father, still live by obsolete customs. Colleton County also has a growing population of black and female professionals, as well as spreading residential development to accommodate suburbanites from the coastal cities 150 miles away. One of Maron's many skills is her ability to weave into her story the social changes coming to this region with the speed of that hurricane. Agent, Vicky Bijur. Mystery Guild main selection. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
When someone snuffs out the life of a Colleton County attorney's wife in the local motel, Detective Dwight Bryant gets the case. And since he's best pals with Judge Deborah Knott, who happens to be breaking in her new house nearby, the two gather clues in tandem. The victim's promiscuity surprises no one except her husband, so there are plenty of suspects, including a partner in the Knott family law firm. Elsewhere, a preacher's wife finds out about her husband's infidelity, while their son tracks Hurricane Fran, coming up the North Carolina coast, for his science project. A rousing combination of natural disaster and narrative creativity, this seventh novel in the Deborah Knott series is highly recommended. [Mystery Guild main selection.] Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Beliefnet
Maron gets more than just the accents right. The Knott booksoffer one of the most even-handed portrayals of Southern religion you'll find anywhere in fiction today. Churchgoing is as central to her evocation of Southern life as the iced tea that big-haired women are constantly pouring. Colleton County believes, but the citizenry's faith is quiet. Maron never settles for caricature: Colletonites are neither fanatical evangelicals nor the indifferent mainliners that sociologists would have you believe fill America's churches. Deborah, a District Court judge, is a Southern Baptist, but a feminist and a Democrat too, who goes to church to pray and to press the flesh. "Election day was still two months away ... Nevertheless, I continued to hit as many churches as I could every Sunday." (Beliefnet, May 2000)


From Booklist
Maron's popular Judge Deborah Knott series stands somewhere between Hess' Maggody novels and Muller's Sharon McCone series, mixing Muller's realistic take on a female crime-solver with the rural southern ambience of the Maggody tales (minus the wacky humor). This time, the residents of Colleton County, North Carolina, must contend with dual threats: Hurricane Fran, gearing up offshore, and the presence of a nasty murderer in their midst. Lynn Bullock, known as a tramp by all except, perhaps, her husband, is strangled in a local motel, dressed for a tryst, and Deborah's cousin Reid is a top suspect. More bodies turn up as the hurricane arrives to wreak another kind of destruction on the locals. The murder plot unravels with few surprises, but the focus of the story is on the subplots, detailing interpersonal travails among Deborah's friends and family, all of whom come together at a down-home hurricane party. Maron's real subject is community, its abiding pleasures and its inevitable complexities, and this novel treats both with great sensitivity. Bill Ott

FROM OUR EDITORS

Winner of the Agatha Award for Best Novel Published in the Year 2000

The Barnes & Noble Review
I've been reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately, notably Tender is the Night and a number of the so-called "slick" stories he wrote. The first thing that surprised me was how many of his stories brush up against the crime genre. In his notebooks he talks about how criminals are a part of all society -- Balzac said pretty much the same thing -- and yet people are always surprised when they come up against evidence of crime in their own lives.

Margaret Maron explores this theme in her excellent new novel, Storm Track. Lillian Bullock, a woman most townspeople of Colleton County, North Carolina, thought of as loose, is found dead in a motel. And from that room the ripples and eddies of suspicion spread far and wide. Her death forces an entire town to come up against evidence of crime in their own lives.

Judge Deborah Knott finds herself looking at her town and her friends in a chilling new light. The homicide touches a number of lives close to hers, even including her kin. She has suspicions she doesn't want to have and begins to perceive certain people in ways she fights against. Maron dramatically contrasts the emotional storm with Hurricane Fran, a fury of biblical wrath about to be visited upon Colleton County. Her hurricane details give a reportorial tone that contrasts nicely with the nimble grace of her human portraiture and storytelling. She also has Fitzgerald's (and Chandler's) knack of taking a scene you've read numerous times and doing something new with it -- giving it a new spin or adding a moment of humor or melancholy. For me this is the mark of a first-rate writer: making all the conventions of a genre seem uniquely your own.

Margaret Maron is quietly becoming one of the true masters of contemporary mystery fiction. Her elegantly underplayed Storm Track should win her a whole lot of new fans. (Ed Gorman)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hurricanes rarely make it inland as far as Colleton County, North Carolina. When they do, people remember them as events that mark an entire generation. Domestic storms, on the other hand, hit with regularity. But when the scantily clad body of a promiscuous wife is found in a motel, the killing resounds like a thunderclap through the community.

With her handsome cousin a suspect in the murder, Judge Judy Knott gets personally involved in the case. She soon uncovers a web of secret and illicit affairs that stretches from Deborah's own family. Then the murderer strikes again, even as a real-life storm rages up the Carolina coast. Hurricane Fran, bearing powers that can alter the landscape forever, will deliver a revelation to Deborah Knott about those closest to her -- and a justice greater than man's own.

Mesmerizing, psychologically complex, and cleverly plotted with surprises and twists, Storm Track is great, powerful fiction￯﾿ﾽand Margaret Maron at her best.

SYNOPSIS

When a local attorney's promiscuous wife is killed in Colleton County, North Carolina, the victim's numerous lovers scurry for cover stories. Judge Deborah Knott begins her own investigation and finds a tangled web of secrets linking half the county.

FROM THE CRITICS

Toby Bromberg - Romanic Times

Storm Track is human drama of the highest sort, guaranteed to keep you riveted. Maron does a masteful job of plotting her mystery against the growing storm, keeping the tension running at high octane. Long time fans will be expecially pleased as Maron further explores the entwined family of Deborah Knott.

Ann Prichard - USA Today

The plucky, Nancy Drew-like heroine, down-home setting and racy plot line combine to make it a very tasty whodunit.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

In this seventh book in the Deborah Knott mystery series, Judge Knott is drawn into an investigation of a local murder, and suspicion turns to a member of her own family, disclosing a secret romance and much more. A few reviewers found it "imaginative, entertaining and thrilling." Most countered with "forced and stilted, the storm was the most interesting part of the book." "It moves at the pace of a hurricane - slowly, inexorably, and ominously toward a foregone conclusion."

Publishers Weekly

Judge Deborah Knott of the Colleton County (N.C.) District Court is one of the most delightful and original of contemporary amateur detectives. The youngest of 12 children--and the only girl--she knows everyone in the county and is never shy about poking her nose in all manner of suspicious happenings. Then she sits readers down for a cosy chat about her adventures, as though they were old friends. In the series's seventh novel (Homes Fires), when promiscuous Lynn Bullock is found strangled in the Orchid Motel wearing black lace underwear, suspects include several local men as well as the deceased's attorney husband, Jason, and Deborah's womanizing cousin Reid Stephenson. But Deborah saw all of these men playing softball at the time of the murder. The judge helps investigate the crime, but soon she has to confront another killer--ferocious Hurricane Fran, fast approaching from the coast. Maron immerses the reader in the down-home, inbred world of the rural South, where intertwined family histories are common knowledge and some old-timers, like Deborah's unrepentant bootlegger father, still live by obsolete customs. Colleton County also has a growing population of black and female professionals, as well as spreading residential development to accommodate suburbanites from the coastal cities 150 miles away. One of Maron's many skills is her ability to weave into her story the social changes coming to this region with the speed of that hurricane. Agent, Vicky Bijur. Mystery Guild main selection. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal