It's Halloween in the north Florida woods and Luanne Fogarty finds brand-new bones along with the old in an abandoned slave graveyard. An antebellum discord simmers into the present day and Luanne's college students are up to ghoulish tricks. She dives in slime-covered ponds and navigates folk legends with the help of forensics. The Southern past rarely stays buried long in the swamp. This is the sixth in the Luanne Fogarty series of spine-tingling swamp noir mysteries set in the springs and underwater caves of northern Florida where Luanne, a linguistics professor, serves as adjunct scuba diver for the sheriff's department.
Read this book. It was pretty violent but did keep me guessing.In her first novel Rice presents a cast of passionate, colorful characters in a sultry, lush, Southern-gothic setting. Most of the residents of small, quiet Essex, S.C., know each other. Neighbors tend their gardens and leave the doors to their homes unlocked. City-dwellers like 30-ish engineer Stoney McFarland and his photographer wife Anna move to Essex to enjoy a simpler way of life--that is until Sarah Roth, a town matriarch, is found brutally murdered. Maum Chrish, a black woman who practices voodoo in the swamps, quickly becomes a suspect although there is no evidence to prove her guilt. Stoney has his own ideas about who murdered Sarah and he becomes obsessed with solving the crime. During one of South Carolina's worst heat waves, Stoney's suspicions draw the entire community, now paranoid with fear, into a dangerous investigation. Rice maintains a level of creepy suspense despite some awkward, overlong passages about sex and voodoo that sometimes lack credibility. Though the mystery is central to the plot, the identity and motive of the killer are not proven. But Rice's psychologically adept portrayal of a community suddenly forced to acknowledge evil, and her evocative use of atmospheric detail, make this an auspicious debut. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the masterful New York Times bestselling and two-time Edgar Award-winning author of The Last Child and Down River, comes this tour de force of murder and the dark ripples it sends through a man, his family and community.
Jackson Workman Pickens—known to most as Work—mindlessly holds together his life: a failing law practice left to him when his father, Ezra, mysteriously disappeared, a distant wife, and a fragile sister, Jean, damaged by the shared past they’ve endured.
And then Ezra’s body is discovered.
Set to inherit his father’s fortune, Work becomes a prime suspect. But so does Jean. Fearing the worst, Work launches his own investigation, crossing paths with a power-hungry detective, a string of damning evidence, and the ugly rumors that swirl within his small, moneyed Southern town. Desperate for the redemption that has eluded him for so many years and stripped of everything he once valued, Work fights to save his sister, clear his name, and regain the love of the woman to whom he gave his heart so many years before.
Praise for King of Lies:
“The King of Lies moves and reads like a book on fire.” ---Pat This was a good book , Loved the setting, hated his wife......... felt sorry for the girl he kept turning tooo. Loved that he brought home the dog....
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