Take Out, by Margaret Maron

When Margaret Maron announced that she was retiring from writing, it finally motivated me to try her first series, police procedurals centered around Lt. Sigrid Harald of the New York Police Department. I have for many years been a big fan of the Deborah Knott series set in the fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. I re-read the books regularly, and I was sorry when Maron announced that the 20th, Long Upon the Land, would be the last. I've gotten very attached to Judge Deborah Knott and her extended family.

I had already read Maron's two stand-alone novels, Bloody Kin and Last Lessons of Summer, both set in North Carolina as well. The events in Bloody Kin take place before the first Deborah story and though it doesn't feature the Knott family, it introduces people who play important parts in the series. I also tracked down two books of her short stories, the covers of which I find unsettling:

I remember picking up one of the Sigrid Harald books at the library at some point, but it was late in the series and concerned the death of a major character. That didn't seem a good place to start, but it also didn't inspire me to look for the earlier books. I finally "met" Sigrid in Three-Day Town, where Deborah and her husband Dwight spend a belated honeymoon in New York (and of course stumble into a murder case). Sigrid, whose grandmother lives in Colleton County, then comes to North Carolina in the following book, The Buzzard Table. When Margaret Maron wrote a final book for Sigrid's series, I decided it was time to complete my collection of her books and finally read those stories.

I enjoyed the series, if not quite as much as the Knott books. I appreciate a police series with a woman lead, and these also include minimal gore. However, Take Out is not the place to start the series, if anyone were inclined to start a nine-book series with the last book (I couldn't, myself). It begins with One Coffee With, where Sigrid and her team are called to investigate a murder in the art department of Vanderlyn College. They follow the familiar police procedural format, as different members of the team follow up leads under Sigrid's directions. There are personal asides as well, such as Sigrid's relationship with her mother, a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist. Sigrid's father, also an NYPD detective, was killed in the line of duty when she was a child, and we gradually learn more about his death and her parents' lives.

I don't know if this counts as a spoiler, but I'll leave a couple of extra lines just in case.



We also see Sigrid's slowly-developing relationship with Oscar Nauman, whom she meets during the investigation at the college. He is the chair of the department and also one of the leading artists of the 20th century. Sigrid is a prickly loner who doesn't want to get involved with Nauman, but he gradually wins her over (and not in a creepy demanding way). But then, just as they settle into their relationship, he is killed in a car accident in California. Sigrid collapses into grief, and that book (Past Imperfect) was really hard to read. She also learns that Nauman has left his entire estate to her. With the paintings alone she is suddenly rich, yet also responsible for his legacy.

Take Out opens about a year after his death - though oddly before the events in Three-Day Town (and as a reference to "the Towers" makes clear, before 9/11). The case involves two men found dead on a bench, with containers of take-out food between them. The lasagna and fettuccine they shared turn out to be laced with coumadin, a blood thinner. One of the victims was a homeless man, Matty, a drug addict whose godmother (a Mafia widow) regularly sent boxes of take-out to the park bench. There seems to be no connection with the other man, Jack, a retired stagehand. The investigation plays out against a background of disturbing news for Sigrid: a young man has arrived from Germany, claiming to be Nauman's biological son and therefore entitled to his estate. There is also a neat little subplot linking back to Corpus Christmas, set in a not-very-exciting historic house museum. Maron writes in an "Author's Note" that "those pictures that had been left stashed in the basement of the Breul House...kept begging to be taken out of that trunk," and partly inspired this book.

Like the other books in the series, Take Out feels a bit old-fashioned to me, and not just because Maron deliberately set it in the 1990s. I think I will pick up these books when I am in the mood for a police procedural. I re-read the Knott books for the setting and the characters, as much as for the cases that Deborah and Dwight investigate. Actually, writing this makes me think it may be time for another visit back to Colleton County.

Long Upon the Land, by Margaret Maron

When Margaret Maron announced the publication of this, the 20th in her series of "Deborah Knott novels," she also announced that it would be the last. She said she felt that all the Knott stories have been told. Deborah Knott, the main character of the series, is a district court judge living in North Carolina, in the fictional Colleton County. She grew up on a farm, the youngest of twelve children, the only daughter. Her father Kezzie Knott was once the best-known moonshiner in the county, if not the state. An elderly man of almost 90 years, he now farms the family land, as do many of Deborah's brothers and their families. She is married to Dwight Bryant, a deputy sheriff, whose cases sometimes overlap with those she hears on the bench.

In this book, Margaret Maron has two stories to tell. The first involves a dying man, whom Kezzie Knott finds lying on a back road through their property. It takes the police a while to identify him as Vick Earp, a local man with a history of domestic violence. He had a grudge against the Knotts, because he blamed them for the loss of his family's property. Kezzie Knott bought it from his shiftless father years ago, but Earp believes it was stolen away from him. He also had some run-ins with Deborah's brothers over the years. So the local paper, looking to stir up scandal, all but accuses Kezzie Knott of murder, and Dwight of covering it up to protect his father-in-law.

Deborah suspects that her father and her brother Haywood know more than they're saying. She keeps an eye on the investigation, but she is also following a mystery of her own. Her brother Will gives her an early birthday present: their mother's brass Zippo lighter. Sue Knott died many years ago, when Deborah was 18. She was their father's second wife. Against her mother's wishes, she married someone far out of her social class: a high-school drop-out, a convicted felon and a moonshiner, a widower left with eight sons. The marriage was a happy one, and so was their family life. Now Deborah wonders about the initials engraved on the lighter, "W.R.M." and the inscription on the inside, signed "Leslie." She knows that her mother met Walter McIntyre during the war, while she was volunteering at the U.S.O. And Sue told her daughter that though she wasn't in love with him, Mac "changed her life." It's too late to ask her mother, but Deborah hopes to discover more about Mac and Leslie, and about her parents. As she asks questions, the narrative shifts to flashbacks where we meet Sue and Mac, and then Kezzie.

As always, reading this book felt like meeting old friends again. I feel like I could almost drive through Colleton County without a map. I'd stop at the BBQ house one of the cousins owns, where the family gathers to eat, and then to play and sing together. The two mysteries in this story are both interesting ones. I knew Mr. Kezzie hadn't killed Vick Earp, but there were several other suspects with various motives. I did spot one clue before the detectives, which made me feel smart for a few pages, but as usual I was on the wrong track in the end. I enjoyed meeting the younger Kezzie Knott, and Sue, who has been a large presence in the books through her children's memories. And the final chapter is an interesting one. The younger generation of Knotts has been looking to diversify the family farms, once based on tobacco. Here they have hit on what I think is a brilliant idea, and I'd love to know how it works out.

I did have two quibbles with Kezzie and Sue's story, however, at least as told here. First, it doesn't seem to fit the framework of the series. Kezzie Knott is nearly 90 in this book, which is clearly set in the present day (up to the minute, based on some of Deborah's political comments).  If he was born in 1925, he simply cannot be a widower with eight sons in 1945, when we first meet him - even that includes a set of twins. He married his first wife Annie Ruth as a young man, but he wasn't 12-13 years old. I think Margaret Maron wanted to use World War II for Mac's story, so she shoehorned Kezzie and Sue's story into it.

Edited to add: I withdraw this quibble, and I apologize to Ms. Maron for suggesting that she is guilty of sloppy plotting. In fact, just the opposite: I've been re-reading some of the earlier books in this series, and it's clear how very carefully she plotted out the family story. In the second book, Southern Discomfort (published in 1993), Deborah and her father visit the family graveyard where Annie Ruth is buried. Deborah takes notice of her grave marker, which states that she died in 1944. In the third book, Shooting at Loons (published in 1994), Deborah meets an elderly man who knew her mother Sue and Aunt Zell where they were working in the USO. Deborah remembers the man in this last book, and he is one of the people she tries to track down for more information. What I did not take into account was that the first book in this series (Bootlegger's Daughter) was published in 1992. Though these books were published over a 23-year span, only a few years have passed in the characters' world. I've read other authors' comments on this challenge, in writing a long series. Sue Grafton, for example, chose to keep Kinsey Milhone in the world of the 1980s, though the books span 30-plus years. Margaret Maron took a different approach, in moving her characters forward in time, but not tying their lives to the real timeline outside of the books, if that makes sense. As I mentioned above, it is clearly the 2010s in this last book, but Deborah and her family are only a few years older than in Bootlegger's Daughter. I also noted that in Southern Discomfort, no one even has a cell phone, and running up to a convenience store to use their pay phone is taken for granted, while in the later books they have all the latest technology.

I think she rushed Kezzie and Sue's story at the end, in a way that felt out of character (even though I only met Sue in this book).  *I stand by this quibble though!

But this just a quibble. I really did enjoy this return to the Knott family. Even if Margaret Maron feels now that all of their stories have been told, I hope that like Ursula Le Guin with the Earthsea books, she will discover that there are still some after all.

A dying woman's dangerous secrets

Designated Daughters, Margaret Maron

The publication of this, the 19th book in the Deborah Knott series of mysteries, caught me by surprise.  I've gotten so used to authors announcing their upcoming books, usually months in advance.  But the first I knew of this one was an email from the author on its release day last week.  I immediately made plans to stop for a copy on my way home from work - a prospect that made my day brighter right from the start.

This is a series I really enjoy.  It is set in North Carolina, in the farm country of the fictional Colleton County, where Deborah Knott is a district court judge married to a deputy sheriff, Dwight Bryant.  They are raising his son by a previous marriage, Cal, whom Deborah recently adopted.  Both of their families have roots deep in the area.  Deborah is the youngest of twelve children (and the only daughter).  Most of her brothers have settled around the family farm, raising their own families, as have some of their children in turn.  At the head of the family is the patriarch Kezzie Knott, once the most famous moonshiner in the county, if not the state.  He has supposedly retired, finally.  His son-in-law the deputy sheriff certainly doesn't want to know otherwise.

This story is set in the heart of the Knott family.  Kezzie's youngest sister Rachel is dying, lying silent and still in hospice care at the local hospital.  But one afternoon, she suddenly begins to speak again.  As the news spreads through the family, they gather at her bedside with longtime friends.  Rachel's words are clear, but they don't always make sense, as she moves back and forth in time, with threads of story switching from person to person.  Sometimes she speaks of her brother Jacob, who died more than sixty years ago in a swimming accident.  Jacob's twin Jedidiah was so distraught that he ran off to join the army, only to be killed himself in a training accident.  The twin tragedies have always weighed on the family, particularly their youngest sister.  Rachel also speaks in fragments of an abusive husband, a terrible flirt, someone who didn't pay his debts, and a father unknowingly raising another man's child.  She gives no names to these people, leaving the family to try and puzzle out their identities.

But her words have already threatened someone.  While the family is taking a break out of the room, Rachel is killed, suffocated with a pillow.  As Dwight and the police begin to investigate, they uncover the secrets behind Rachel's words.  They also learn that Jacob Knott's death in a creek all those years ago may not have been the accident everyone assumed.  While I have finally gotten Deborah's family sorted out (with the help of the family tree printed in the front of every book), I found all the secrets and the suspects a little hard to follow at times.  But the two cases are brought to neat and logical conclusions in the end, though the family may not feel that justice has been done.

There is a third element to this story, which is reflected in the title.  One of the cases that comes before Deborah's court is that of a brother suing a sister over their mother's estate.  The sister was the caregiver for the mother, while the brother now shows more interest in the estate than he ever did in his mother's care.  Through the case, Deborah meets a group that calls itself the "Designated Daughters."  Its members have become the caregivers for aging parents or ill siblings or even aunts and uncles, the ones who accept that responsibility for the rest of the family.  Some of the "Designated Daughters" are actually men, but the majority are women.  One of the members has been defrauded by the agent who handled an estate sale, and they want Deborah's help.  I know many people who are in the position of "Dedicated Daughters" (and sons).  My sisters took on that role with my mother; I was too far away in Texas to do more than visit and provide long-distance support.  Though the "Daughters" and through the Knotts, Margaret Maron explores the stresses on modern families, particularly with aging and illness, but also the fluid boundaries of what makes a family.  As Deborah notes of her son Cal, "Maybe not the child of my body, but damned if he's not the child of my heart." 

I always enjoy spending time with the Knotts, particularly Mr. Kezzie, and I sure wish Colleton weren't a fictional place.

Murder in Colleton County

Christmas Mourning, Margaret Maron

I always enjoy picking out some Christmas-themed reading around this time of year.  Somehow I often end up reading mysteries, whose violent themes might seem a bit at odds with the season.  Many of my favorite mystery authors have set books around the holidays.  Is there a connection, I wonder, with the old tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas?  Or maybe it's a recognition of the stresses that can come with the holidays, among family and friends as well as complete strangers.  I hope it's not just to market the books as Christmas presents.

Margaret Maron has set two of her books featuring Deborah Knott, a district court judge in North Carolina, at Christmas.  The first, Rituals of the Season, takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas, as Deborah is preparing for her wedding to Major Dwight Bryant, the chief deputy in the Colleton County Sheriff's Department.  This second book is set a year later, just before their first wedding anniversary.   As the book opens, word spreads through the community that Mallory Johnson, a high school senior, has been killed in a car wreck.  She is the latest of several teens to die in such accidents, some caused by underage drinking. But Mallory's death hits especially hard: she was a cheerleader, beautiful and popular, the Homecoming Queen, heading off to college and a bright future after graduation.  Mallory was on her way home from a party when she died, and the autopsy shows alcohol and drugs in her system,  No one can believe it; her grief-stricken father insists that someone must have spiked her drink.  Then two young men are found shot outside their trailer home, one a fellow student of Mallory's at the high school.  Is there a connection between these deaths?

Deborah is a lower-court judge who does not handle serious crimes like murder, but she usually finds a way into Dwight's investigations.  In this case, her entrée is her family.  She is the youngest of twelve children, and the only daughter.  Several of her nieces and nephews attend the local high schools and knew Mallory.  Through them she learns more about the girl, her family and friends, and about the accident itself.  Meanwhile Dwight and his team are investigating the two shooting victims.

Woven through the investigations are the family's preparations to celebrate not just Christmas but also the couple's first wedding anniversary.  Deborah initially collects much of her information during a morning spent baking Christmas cookies with her nieces, a long-standing family tradition.  The Knott family, headed by the 81-year-old patriarch Kezzie, is a close-knit one, with farms and homes clustered together on family-held land.  Dwight's family also lives nearby, and there is a lovely sense of family in these stories.  Though the murder cases (and the victims) are never completely forgotten, they are balanced with the fun of choosing presents, bringing in a tree and mistletoe, watching Christmas movies with the nieces and nephews, and eating fruitcake soaked in the moonshine that Mr. Kezzie has supposedly stopping bootlegging.  There is also a touch of romance, with the anniversary coming up.  To borrow a phrase from Dorothy L. Sayers, this might qualify as a Christmas story with detective interruptions, one I thoroughly enjoy.  I like the settings of these stories so much, both the fictional Colleton County and the Knott and Bryant families.  I was hoping for a new one this year, which, yes, would have made a wonderful Christmas present, but it looks like I'll have to wait.

Murder with buzzards

The Buzzard Table, Margaret Maron

This is the latest in Margaret Maron's mystery series set in North Carolina, which feature Deborah Knott, a district court judge married to a deputy sheriff.  She and her husband Dwight Bryant are often drawn into investigating crimes, though from different angles, since the cases rarely fall under Deborah's lower-court jurisdiction.

I always enjoy the mysteries, but what draws me to these stories are the wonderful characters and setting that Margaret Maron has created.  Most of the books are set in the fictional Colleton County.  Once a rural area, it is changing as family farms are dying off, the land sold to developers whose new homes bring in commuters from urban areas.  Deborah's father Kezzie Knott is holding on to his land, which he bought with the proceeds from a long career in bootlegging, from which he has supposedly retired.  Both the judge and the deputy hope that's true.  He in his turn is a little ambivalent about having a judge in the family, though he helped her win an appointment to the bench after she lost her first election (the means he used were unethical but very effective).  Deborah is the youngest of his twelve children, and the only daughter.  She is a great character, smart, inquisitive, loyal, with strong principles and  a good sense of humor - someone you can imagine sitting down with over a cup of coffee.  It's interesting, though, that she has stated in two or three of the books now that she isn't much of a reader.  That catches my attention each time, because it seems unusual; most of the characters I read about are themselves avid readers, including the detectives, from Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane to Corinna Chapman, and I can't off-hand remember another self-proclaimed non-reader.  I find myself thinking of books to to recommend to Deborah!

The first books in the series were almost completely from her point of view, so we got to know her pretty well.  The later books have alternated between her first-person narration and third-person narration, often following her husband Dwight and the members of his team, or sometimes other characters.  This shift gives the stories a wider scope, allowing us to see the crime or the investigation from different angles, and sometimes giving us access to information that not all of the characters have.  These include most of her older brothers, settled around the area on their own land with their children and grandchildren, as are other relatives from both sides of the family.  Each case usually involves some of the many family members (there is a helpful Knott family chart at the start of each book).  Deborah grew up with Dwight, a local boy who attended school with her brothers.  He enlisted in the army after graduation, working in military intelligence, before leaving the service and joining law enforcement.  They are raising his son Cal, who came to live with them after his mother (Dwight's first wife) was murdered.  (Fortunately they are encouraging Cal to read, and in this book Deborah is reading The Hobbit aloud to him.)  Dwight's own family also plays a big part in the later stories, particularly his mother Miss Emily, the principal of the local high school.

In the last book before this one, Three-Day Town, Dwight's sister-in-law Kate gave them a Christmas gift: the use of an apartment in New York City for a belated honeymoon.  One of Kate's Colleton relations asked them to deliver a small package to her daughter in New York, the contents of which led to a man's death.  Deborah and Dwight were drawn into the investigation, which was led by Lt. Sigrid Harald, the main character in an earlier series by Margaret Maron.  Though it is labeled "A Deborah Knott mystery," I felt like she and Dwight were more supporting characters, and I missed them in the story (I didn't really take to Sigrid).

In this book, the tables are turned.  Sigrid and her mother Anne have come to Colleton to visit Anne's mother, Mrs. Lattimore, who is losing her battle with cancer.  Also staying in the area is Mrs. Lattimore's English nephew Martin Crawford, a noted ornithologist working on a book about turkey buzzards.  When the body of a missing real estate agent turns up near the house where Crawford is staying, though, both Dwight and Sigrid start to wonder if the buzzards and their feeding table are a cover for something else.  Then a young high school student also goes missing.  He recently appeared in Deborah's court, accused of trespassing at the small county airstrip, where rumor has it the CIA routinely lands rendition flights to and from Guantanamo (Blackwater apparently got its start in North Carolina).  Could he be connected to the missing woman?  Sigrid rides along with Dwight on part of his investigations, learning about police work in a very different setting.

I very much enjoyed this return to Colleton.  Maron ingeniously winds the different layers of the story together to a complicated but satisfying conclusion.  The political elements make this story feel very topical, and while Maron makes her and Deborah's feelings about war and rendition clear, she is never strident.  I can't say I ever gave much thought to turkey buzzards, but I learned more than I expected from the chapter headings, "taken from the official website of The Turkey Vulture Society" (apparently the birds that we in North America call buzzards are actually vultures).  On a less gruesome topic, I enjoyed meeting the Lattimore/Harald family, as well spending time with the various Knotts and Bryants.  I do wish Deborah's father had played a bigger part in this book, because he's one of my favorite characters.  But we get to see the deepening relationship between Deborah and her stepson, which has had its rough moments.  If it wasn't for the Double Dog Dare, I might even be tempted to go back again to the earlier books in the series.

This book has a lovely dedication to "Barbara Mertz, who extended a generous hand to a ragtag bunch of unknowns,"  one of my favorite authors, who is herself probably better known as Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels.

Murder on a honeymoon

Three-Day Town, Margaret Maron

This is the 17th book in Margaret Maron's series of mysteries featuring North Carolina judge Deborah Knott.  I was introduced to the books by my friend Margaret (not the author) while we were browsing in my beloved Murder by the Book one day.  She handed me the first, Bootlegger's Daughter, with those magical words: "You have to read this."  And she was right.  I wasn't even half-way through it before I was off looking for the rest of the series.

Most of it is set in North Carolina, in the fictional Colleton County where Deborah lives with her husband Dwight Bryant (a deputy sheriff) and his son, as well as their extended families.  Deborah has eleven brothers, who with their wives, ex-wives, and children play a large part in most of the books, as does her father Kezzie, who may or may have retired as a bootlegger (Dwight sure hopes he has, so he doesn't have to arrest his father-in-law one day).  Over the course of the series we've come to know them as well as other relations, colleagues and friends, in the complex and detailed world that Margaret Maron has created.  I wouldn't be surprised if literary tourists show up in North Carolina looking for Colleton the way they do in Louise Penny's Quebec.  I know I'd love to visit.

This book takes Deborah and Dwight out of that familiar setting, to New York City, for a belated honeymoon stay in an apartment owned by Dwight's sister-in-law Kate.  One of Kate's relations, the elderly Mrs. Lattimore, has asked them to deliver a small package to her daughter Anne Harald in New York.  When they arrive in New York, they discover that Anne is out of the country, but they make contact in turn with her daughter Sigrid, a lieutenant with the New York police.  Deborah arranges a meeting with Sigrid to deliver the package, which turns out to be a bronze art object.  She and Dwight are at a neighbor's party when Sigrid arrives, and when Deborah takes her back to their apartment to collect the item, they find the building's super dead in the living room and the bronze object missing.  At that point, Sigrid calls in her team and takes over the case.

The first few books in the series are all told in first-person narration, in Deborah's voice.  Ir's an appealing voice, frank and funny and honest, which draws you right into the story.  As Laurie R. King and Elizabeth Peters did with their first-person characters, though, Margaret Maron began alternating Deborah's chapters with third-person narration, often following Dwight and his team through their part of the mystery.  In this book, the alternate chapters follow Sigrid and her team.  She is the central character in a separate series of eight mysteries, none of which I have read.  There is clearly a lot of history between these characters, and I found it a challenge to keep them all straight.  I also missed Deborah and Dwight who, naturally sidelined from much of the investigation, spend their time playing tourists and honeymooners, though by the end of the case they play a big part in its resolution.  Up to that point, much of the investigation focuses on the residents and employees of the apartment building, and I found it a little difficult to keep track of all of them as well.

As usual, I had no idea who-done-it, but I enjoyed the story and the New York setting, which made me want to play tourist myself.  In the end, Dwight and Deborah cut short their honeymoon to return to Colleton County, and I'm looking forward to returning there again myself.