Bootlegger’s Daughter / Margaret Maron

There are some minor spoilers in this review. It’s 17 years old, so it’s well past the statute of limitations on spoilering.

Bootlegger’s Daughter started off as a good mystery set in rural North Carolina and ended up being a halfway decent setting piece about the area. It did not end up as a good piece of crime fiction though. Simple and straightforward converted to overly complex and cliche-ridden by the end.

The book consists of far more than the mystery. While the crime drives the plot through it’s paces, Maron stops along the way to describe the area, its institutions, and particularly its residents. Deborah Knott is of course the focus. She’s an attorney running for district court judge. She’s also the daughter of a prominent local bootlegger, and so she has a history to deal with, though a great deal of that is in the past. Knott’s other quality that stands out, though it proves less of an issue in this book, is that she is in her mid-30s but still unmarried. Not only unmarried, Knott has dated a series of local men but refused to settle down with any of them. I liked that aspect because Maron had Knott making no apologies for her lifestyle, beyond some acknowledgments that it wasn’t the norm.

Every time Maron introduces the reader to another character or setting, she digresses into a paragraph or two of history and how the character fits into the local fabric. These descriptions don’t really flesh out the characters themselves so much as paint the scenery of the New South and how it’s evolved from the old South. For instance, when Knott becomes the subject of a whisper campaign designed to play on racial fears, she and her opponent head to the small town newspaper publisher to issue a statement. The extended description of the publisher says more about what small newspapers mean to small towns than it does about what kind of character he is.

The mystery is nearly two decades old by the start of the novel. Eighteen year old Janie Whitehead asks Deborah to investigate her mother’s murder when Janie was just a newborn. Janie herself had been found crying, unfed near her mother’s body. At first the crime part is good reading, as Knott intersperses asking questions with her judicial race. But it devolves into cliches about halfway through.

Characters stop taking actions that make sense. One person living near the crime scene, Michael Vickery, is pretty traumatized by the crime and years later still doesn’t want to talk about it. Both he and his live-in lover, Denny McCloy, are friends with Deborah Knott. Rather than ask Knott to make her questions of his lover quick and emotion free, McCloy decides to anonymously shoot at her to scare her away from investigating. The former would have been vastly more effective.

Contrived Hollywood techniques are overused. On more than one occasion Knott decides to go solo rather than call the police. Worse, the local police do the same. Rather than radio in to investigators when clues arise, officers make the excuse that it’s too late to call or radio and head into dark spooky places alone. Or they decide stumble on a possible suspect and decide to conduct a full impromptu interrogation at the scene, alone, rather than bring him to jail and where the environment is controlled.

The ending was also pure Hollywood. Having essentially gotten away with it, the bad guy comes back with a warped sense of blame to exact revenge on people who clearly weren’t responsible for the predicament. If the mailman hadn’t delivered the mail with that letter-bomb, my accomplice would still be alive! Therefore the mailman must die! Thus both the mystery is solved and the killer apprehended and I wondered why both of these developments had so little basis in the earlier story. The killer fits. But there’s no setup for it.

Loved the portrayal of the setting and characters. Hated the mystery (at least the second half).

Other blogged reviews (which pretty much all disagree with me):

• Vixen’s Daily Reads
• The Sleepy Reader
• The Good, The Bad and the Bookish

Title: Bootlegger’s Daughter
Author: Margaret Maron
Narrator: C. J. Critt
Series: Imperfect; 1
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Audiobook download
Length: 9 h. 30 m.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4361-2053-1
Subject: Knott, Deborah (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women lawyers — Fiction
Subject: North Carolina — Fiction
LC classification: PS3563.A679 B6 1992