Having Used "Winter's Child" as a bridge

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	• Hard Row Margaret Maron Grand Central Publishing, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hard row to beat

Margaret Maron does it again with Hard Row. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the details about North Carolina's migrant situation. I think it's the best yet. Congrats!

Southern Mystery

The main problem with Margaret Maron is she can't write these books as fast as we can read them. Finishing the last book felt like being orphaned from Colleton County. These books are a bit of mystery, a bit of romance, and a lot of Southern culture and family. Start with the Bootleggers Daughter and keep going to Hard Row. Its always a treat to find an author you've never heard of and have her blow you away.

For an added treat let CJ Critt use her sweet voice to enchant you even more.

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Having Used "Winter's Child" as a bridge

to a new family life for Judge Deborah Knott Bryant, Margaret Maron returns her to the bench and the familiarity of Colleton County, NC for last year's "Hard Row". As is the case with most of Maron's writings, we get some no nonsense "judgeship" from Deborah, mixed with family happenings and societal pressures in rural NC.

In this tale, we are enlightened by the discovery that it is not only the border states that cope with the reliance on illegal immigrant labor, only to subject the workers to callousness, indifference and bigotry in the "land of opportunity". But this isn't a political tome, just a sensible use of the current state as a backdrop for a horrendous series of crimes that Judge Deborah's new husband Dwight has to investigate.
Mix in a little family dynamic of Deborah and Dwight getting used to having Dwight's son, Cal, live with them and try to recover from his mom's death.. and you have "Hard Row", a welcome 13th edition to Maron's down home series set in North Carolina.

A good read, but you'll enjoy it far more if you've read the other books in the series.

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Hard Row

This is a good addition to a good series. Maron does a good job of keeping her characters and local realistic while spinning a good story.

Hard Row, Easy Read

Deborah Knott is a hard working judge in a small Southern community. She's the youngest child and only daughter of a notorious character who in his heyday, was a bootlegger during Prohibition. Every book in this series is strongly rooted in North Carolina clay, portraying community, church and family as the bedrock of Deborah's life.

This is the thirteenth book in this satisfying series, each book of which can stand alone, and taken together they track the changes happening in Deborah's life. Time and change have also come to the fictional setting of Colleton County, with Mexican immigrants adding a new note to the traditional black/white shades. The book opens with a knifing in a local Latino bar that quickly winds up in Deborah's court. Then pieces of corpses start turning up--Deborah's husband, the deputy sheriff has to investigate this serious crime and disentangle the real murder from the accident.

Marriage to the deputy sheriff has not slowed Deborah down. She picks up on inadvertent clues that fall in her court room to solve the murder. Her dealings with her new stepson are "judicious". She becomes a fan of professional hockey. As always in this near-perfect series, there's exquisite moments of comic relief, in this one, an unusual parking lot vigilante tells a story involving a pickup truck and a hound dog that should have been cited but were not.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

As Judge Deborah Knott presides over a case involving a barroom brawl, it becomes clear that deep resentments over race, class, and illegal immigration are simmering just below the surface in the countryside. An early spring sun has begun to shine like a blessing on the fertile fields of North Carolina, but along with the seeds sprouting in the thawing soil, violence is growing as well. Mutilated body parts have appeared along the back roads of Colleton County, and the search for the victim's identity and for that of his killer will lead Deborah and her new husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, into the desperate realm of undocumented farm workers exploited for cheap labor.
In the meantime, Deborah and Dwight continue to adjust to married life and to having Dwight's eight-year-old son, Cal, live with them full time. When another body is found, these newlyweds will discover dark truths that threaten to permanently alter the serenity of their rural surroundings and their new life together.

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