Deborah Knott is a down-to-earth woman who grew up in the back hills of North Carolina. Her roots show in her speech and in the way she thinks about things. Within just a few moments, I felt like I had gotten to know a new friend. The pages whizzed by with astonishing speed.
The court stuff was interesting. Court cases and a chance to be voyeuristic on someone else’s troubles appeal to a lot of readers. I enjoyed seeing the small town trouble and how Deborah dealt with it. I grew up in a small town myself, so a lot of the people she was writing about seemed very familiar to me.
Chapter Two gives us a closer look at Deborah’s home life and gives us an idea of her relationship and history with Dwight and her new stepson, Cal. A minor family emergency occurs when Dwight gets called in to work a murder and Deborah is plunged directly into her new role as stepmom to save Cal’s evening. The boy is a big hockey fan, and he and his dad had had plans to go to a game. Deborah picks up the slack and discovers she has a love for hockey, finding yet a new way that her sudden family is going to work out.
As enjoyable as that all is, and given that the mystery smoothly moves into first gear, I was totally blown away by the events in Chapter Five. As it is in a lot of small towns, Deborah’s family owns land that they also farm. Over the years the land has been divided up between several families, which forces them to agree on how to work the land together in order to leverage the most profit. Discussion on which crops to grow, and the potential problems that may grow out of the growing, were intriguing. I grew up around a lot of that myself, but I’ve lived in the larger cities so long that I haven’t thought much of it. I enjoyed getting back to my roots by listening to Deborah and her family discuss these problems that loom so large in the lives of small towns.
Article comments
1 - sch
Dwight's ex-wife was murdered. She did not just pick up and leave to take care of herself. That it what the last book "Winter's Child" was all about.