Death's Half Acre
Margaret Maron
Grand Central Publishing, 2009
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 978-0446618083
320 pages; $7.99

Sand Sharks
Margaret Maron
Grand Central Publishing, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0446196116
304 pages; $24.99

I still miss Margaret Maron’s series character Sigrid Haraldson. But her Deborah Knott series has been so successful that it seems unlikely that Maron will ever leave North Carolina for New York, or step off the bench and back into the police station.

Fortunately, the Judge Knott series remains fun to read, if a tad too cozy for my taste. I normally zip through these books in about a day, just to catch up with Deborah, her husband, her stepson, her 11 brothers and her father, a former bootlegger. They’re also interesting books to read in terms of technique, because Maron pulls off some stunts that most mystery writers couldn’t get away with, such as switching the point of view or changing voice (from first person to third and back again). Without using these tricks, Maron couldn’t play fair with her audience about solving the mystery (though she still doesn’t manage it in these two books, in my opinion); and she couldn’t have several parallel stories playing out at once. A more skillful writer would probably be able to manage all that while staying in a single character’s point of view and voice, but here the changes simply seem to make the books feel all the more comfortable and unchallenging – good for a quick read, but not intended to make the reader think too much.

Death's Half Acre tells the story of a county commissioner who tends to favor developers who are quickly despoiling the countryside with ticky-tacky houses, and to have a little too much money at her disposal. Unless she’s milking her cleaning business of profits and failing to pay what she’s supposed to pay to her ex-husband or taking bribes, there doesn’t seem to be any way she could afford to pay cash for her new house. When she is murdered, it looks as if she might also be engaged in blackmail. But who was her victim, if there was one? And who killed her?

The real treat of Death's Half Acre, though, is the parallel mystery we get involving Deborah’s father, Kezzie. In the first chapter, a man approaches Kezzie Knott to ask his help in preventing his grandmother from giving away her land to an apparently corrupt preacher. We’ve already seen this misogynist at work in the prologue, when he forces his wife to perform a distasteful act in front of his entire congregation on Easter Sunday. So we want to see what Kezzie will get up to, and his machinations don’t disappoint.

Deborah gets into more trouble than she should in this book, and nearly pays a high price for it. Her motive for failing to go to the police with key evidence seems to me rather weak, but that sometimes happens in cozies. Still, one would think a judge would have more sense.

Deborah seems to have her head on a bit straighter in Sand Sharks, which takes place oceanside during a judges’ conference. The plot here is a bit tighter than in Death's Half Acre, but the mystery of who did the killing is a lot less fair. The real joy of this book is watching Deborah interact with her fellow judges, including Will Blackstone, who readers might remember from an earlier book (I sure did, and I was chuckling almost from the moment he made his first appearance as a result). I enjoyed the war stories the judges tell one another about their work, the description of the topics at the conference, and the camaraderie the judges share. Perhaps it’s because I’m a lawyer and have been to similar conferences myself, but this just felt comfortable and right.

I read Maron’s books with the expectation that I’ll get a pleasant couple of hours out of them, and that expectation is always met. There is absolutely no challenge here, not even much of a challenge to use my imagination. But they’re fun. One can’t complain about that.