Margaret Maron has won nearly every prize given to mystery fiction for her novels about North Carolina judge Deborah Knott.
Maron kicked off the series 16 years ago with “Bootlegger’s Daughter.” The new “Sand Sharks” (Grand Central Publishing) is the 15th book about this very wise and witty woman who manages to run into almost as much crime off the bench as she does in the courtroom.
Maron grew up on a tobacco farm near Raleigh, but spent many years living in Brooklyn, Washington, D.C. and Italy, before she and her husband returned to North Carolina.
The years spent away from home allow Maron to be clear-eyed about her native state.
The writer’s love of the place is on every page of “Sand Sharks,” but North Carolina has changed drastically since Maron was born there in the Depression era.
The state has veered from agriculture to high tech and tons of newcomers have arrived in the form of retirees from the North. The new novel is set in the coastal communities of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach where a new wrinkle has been added to the North Carolina scene in the form of movie and TV production.
“Sand Sharks” follows Deborah to a summer beach conference for the state’s district court judges — she looks forward to combining business and pleasure in a brief break from her recent marriage to a cop with a nine year old son. Deborah loves the boy but is looking forward to a little time on her own.
Just when the power of the sun and the sand — and the seafood — is working its magic on our heroine, one of the judges is found strangled. The list of suspects includes most of his peers as well as the star of a TV series being shot in Wilmington and the staff of the resort restaurant where the victim was dining on the fateful night. Deborah quickly learns that the dead man was a corrupt judge and a pretty miserable human being.
The mystery is a good one, but the real pleasure in “Sand Sharks” comes from the humor and social observations of Deborah (and the novelist pulling her strings).
Deborah knows the incredible nostalgic power many of us feel each summer when we return to a favorite beach town:
“The moon, the stars, the thick brine-ladened air — I had stood gazing out to sea like this on dozens of other summer nights and memory held me in its grip, sending kaleidoscopic images coursing through my head of weekends with Mother and Daddy and my brothers back when I was a child: musty summer cottages borrowed from a more affluent aunt or uncle, pallets of quilts on the floor, sand underfoot no matter how often the floors were swept.”
“A week at the beach for high school graduation, chaperoned by my brother Seth and his new bride: beach music and (dancing) the night away on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach and sneaking sips of beer when Seth’s back was turned, trying to forget for a few hours of time that Mother would be dead by the end of that summer.”
“Sand Sharks” will delight the fans who have come to know Deborah Knott so well over the course of more than two dozen books. But, Maron has always done a fine job of making her novels work as stand alone experiences, too (although I have a strong hunch her new readers will be very happy to have all of those earlier stories to read).
