Rent: Hard Row

Deborah Knott returns in style with a complex mix of supporting characters as companions in HARD ROW, the 13th of Margaret Maron's award winning series. Marriage and immediate parenthood make for personal problems, but nothing a little common sense can't handle.
In this one the killer was a forgone conclusion, but the road traveled by Dwight and Deborah made for fun reading. This series is a mix of cozy and police procedural and law as governed by the state of North Carolina.
Young ideas meet resistance as the Knott family struggle to adjust to the changing patterns of southern agriculture. Makes one wonder how Ms. Maron will handle the drought that each southern farmer had to contend with during the summer of 2007.
HARD ROW will send you to others in this fine series if you haven't previous read them.
Nash Black, author of TRAVELERS and SINS OF THE FATHERS.

Margaret Maron's best Deborah Knott/Dwight Bryant books are the ones set in Dobbs/Colleton County. This is one of them. The story is told through each main investigating character. Body parts are showing up all over the place and how this is resolved is deftly done. Once again, her depictions of the Southern mindset are wonderful. I highly recommend this to all lovers of mysteries.

It's such fun to discover a really good series of crime novels. I usually do so along about the third or fourth book - as I did with Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series - and have the fun of reading the back titles in order in a short time. And a little suspense when I pick up the next new book in the series: will it be as good as the ones before, or will the series start running out of steam?

Margaret Maron is keeping this series going strong. "Hard Row" finds Deborah and her new husband Dwight at home with Dwight's young son Cal as spring approaches in Colleton County. One of her county court cases intersects Dwight's investigation of a grisly murder case - body parts have been turning up one by one.

This story doesn't feature a lot of Knott family drama, instead touching on the private lives of two of Dwight's deputies. The major theme here, though, is agriculture: the possible crops the Knott family will grow instead of tobacco, the key role of immigrant labor, farmers who mistreat those laborers and farmers who treat them right, and the ingrained prejudice against them.

A subplot notes the chilling truth of domestic violence in our society. Unlike another reviewer, I don't think Maron brings in the issue of "gun control" here - she recognizes that although a threatening ex-husband's guns may be seized by the police under a court order, that doesn't guarantee he can't get another one, without preaching about it.

In "Hard Row," Deborah and Dwight deal in their respective jobs with some cases of cruelty and violence, while their family life is solid, warm and loving - although certainly not perfect.

I love Margaret Maron's books, esp since I live in NC. Reading one of her books is like going home. The reader is so familiar with her family.

Great read!!

First Sentence: El Toro Negro sits net to an abandoned tobacco warehouse a few feet inside the Dobbs city limits.

Judge Deborah Knot has a case before her dealing with race, class and illegal immigration. For her new husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, tt starts with the discovery to two bare legs. Than a hand and, literally bit-by-bit, other body parts turn up. Even before the police can look for the killer, they need to find the identity of the victim.

I wasn't certain how Maron was going to incorporate Deborah's marriage into the stories, but I needn't have worried. Maron is such a wonderful writer, she really makes it work. Each character is dealing with their own jobs with the link being their home, family and Dwight's son Cal who lives with them since the murder of his mother in the previous book. For me, this lends real levels to the story and the characters. All the characters are wonderfully dimensional and real, the location as important to the story as the characters and great dialogue. The plotting is excellent and the ending completely unexpected yet not out-of-the blue. Highly recommended