THIRD IN THE SIGRID HARALD SERIES Attorney Clayton Gladwell keeps 'special' cases in blue folders that only he can access, but when Gladwell announces his impending retirement, someone decides that Blue Folder secrets aren't safe unless everyone connected to them is dead. From a long-dead movie star, the owner of a trendy art gallery, and an Algonquin Roundtable personality to a senile resident in a nursing home and a broken-down cleaning woman, Lt. Harald must figure out who hated or feared Gladwell enough to shoot him.

Second in the Sigrid Harald series. Lt. Sigrid Harald investigates the death of Julie Redmond, a beautiful but cold, self-centered and demanding woman. Sigrid digs into Julie Redmond's past, untangling a web of blackmail and murder and half a million dollars' worth of stolen gems, revealing a ruthless mastermind whose cruelty has finally caught up with her.

From Library JournalNorth Carolina district court judge Deborah Knott unintentionally "crashes" several manufacturer's receptions at the internationally known Southeastern Furniture Market in High Point, where she becomes involved in murder. Initially befriended by a mysterious and elusive woman with bogus name tags, series protagonist Knott soon runs into an old woman friend from law school as well as a hunky ex-beau now in the furniture business. When Deborah later discovers the man dead, she and police begin investigating. Maron (Up Jumps the Devil, LJ 8/96) continues her usual warm-hearted, family-oriented approach, tempered with observant detail, infectious enthusiasm, and light humor. Highly recommended.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistIn this fifth entry in the widely praised, increasingly popular Deborah Knott series (following Up Jumps the Devil ), the judge must travel to High Point, North Carolina, to fill in for a vacationing colleague. Unbeknownst to her, the usually sleepy, little town is playing host to the International Home Furnishings Market, attracting companies from all over the world, and Deborah is practically laughed out of every hotel in town when she shows up without reservations. After losing her purse in one of a dozen cocktail-party feeding frenzies, Deborah finally finds a place to stay with an old law-school chum. When her purse is found at the scene of a murder--cutthroat furniture-company executive Chan Nolan is found dead in a pricey wicker porch swing--Deborah is brought in for questioning. Attempting to solve the case by tracking the whereabouts of Nolan's legion of enemies (and also shop for some bedroom furniture), Deborah comes into contact with some real characters, including a onetime legendary designer who has gone off her meds; a pesky, persistent free-lance reporter; and a southern belle with a homicidal streak. All the furniture shoptalk will keep decorating aficionados happy; the rest of us will be more than willing to settle for Deborah's feisty humor and sharp deductive skills. Joanne Wilkinson

Originally published in “A Woman’s Eye,” edited by Sara Paretsky (1991) and republished in “Shoveling Smoke: Selected Mystery Stories by Margaret Maron”, Crippen & Landru (1997). "When I first began to contemplate a new series, Sara Paretsky asked if I’d contribute a story to her anthology. I’d had the germ of this plot for years but could never seem to bring it into focus. It wasn’t a Sigrid Harald situation, but what if I gave it to a young Southern attorney? Or what if it were a district court judge? Or an attorney running for judge? Before I knew it, Deborah Knott strolled into my head and began telling this story. I shall always be grateful to Sara for giving me a chance to “test-drive” Deborah’s first-person voice before tackling Bootlegger’s Daughter." (Cover design: Andrea Maron)(Cover graphic: © 2012 Joe Maron)

From Publishers WeeklyIn this eighth book in the Judge Deborah Knott series (after 2000's Storm Track), Maron employs spare, straightforward prose and the languid language of the Carolina Piedmont to spin an exceptionally gripping tale of hate, jealousy and murder. Still smarting from the betrayal of her lover, Kidd Chapin, the redoubtable jurist travels to Randolph County, N.C., in order to settle the equitable distribution of the marital property of a pair of freshly divorced potters, Sandra Kay Nordan and James Lucas Nordan. Before she can finish her legal duties, however, somebody bakes James Lucas in a kiln. Deborah's own sense of loss in the wake of Kidd's rejection helps her empathize with patriarch Amos Nordan's multiple tragedies (another son died two years earlier) as well as a hired woman's grief over her retarded son. Amidst a beautifully evoked flowering spring countryside, Deborah pursues the murderer with her usual keen eye and common sense. If the book fairly swells with passion, a healthy dose of Southern humor keeps things from getting too maudlin. By the time the story reaches its dramatic conclusion, readers will be in mourning, wishing the end hadn't come so soon. Maron's mastery of jurisprudence, her well-researched depiction of the potting world but especially her sensitive portrayal of human relationships raise this novel far above the ordinary run of mysteries. (May 22)all four top mystery awards the Edgar, the Anthony, the Agatha and the Macavity. Maron, who's also the author of the Sigrid Harald series, will be the guest of honor at this year's Malice Domestic Convention.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalThe famous Nordan family, who live in an area of North Carolina known for its pottery, is being torn apart by a traumatic and bitter divorce. Judge Deborah Knotts (Storm Track) oversees distribution of the marital property, but her work is interrupted by a tragic death in the family reminiscent of a terrible suicide two years earlier. Heady stuff from a talented author. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com ReviewWhen it comes to the weaving of tangled webs, you'll find none finer nor more deceptive than those on the loom of Margaret Maron's Storm Track, the seventh entry in her critically acclaimed Judge Deborah Knott mystery series. Colleton County, North Carolina, is home to Judge Knott, her moonshining daddy (the series opener, 1992's Bootlegger's Daughter, swept the Edgar Allen Poe, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards in unprecedented fashion), and more brothers and cousins than hairs on a big dog's back. Likable young lawyer Jason Bullock lives there too, as does his lovely and--unbeknownst to him--extraordinarily unfaithful wife--an awkward situation all around, which turns even more so when she turns up dead in a local motel, wearing little more than whimsy and a wink:"Who would kill her, Reid?""Hell, I don't know. Usually you'd say the husband, but Bullock was on the ball field, right? Millard King, too.""She slept with Millard King? When?"He shrugged. "Before me, after me, during me--I don't keep tabs."Clues abound, suspects emerge, and chief among them is the judge's cousin, Reid; a cad, certainly, but a killer? Judge Knott thinks not and sets out to prove it, as the body count rises and Hurricane Fran commences to lower the boom.A native North Carolinian, Maron opens a window onto the New South by concerning herself more with her multilayered characters and their intertwined lives than with overstyled prose or plot contrivances. An altogether satisfying mystery, Storm Track will surely propel readers straight through this series and into the prolific Maron's other series featuring Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD. --Michael HudsonFrom Publishers WeeklyJudge Deborah Knott of the Colleton County (N.C.) District Court is one of the most delightful and original of contemporary amateur detectives. The youngest of 12 children--and the only girl--she knows everyone in the county and is never shy about poking her nose in all manner of suspicious happenings. Then she sits readers down for a cosy chat about her adventures, as though they were old friends. In the series's seventh novel (Homes Fires), when promiscuous Lynn Bullock is found strangled in the Orchid Motel wearing black lace underwear, suspects include several local men as well as the deceased's attorney husband, Jason, and Deborah's womanizing cousin Reid Stephenson. But Deborah saw all of these men playing softball at the time of the murder. The judge helps investigate the crime, but soon she has to confront another killer--ferocious Hurricane Fran, fast approaching from the coast. Maron immerses the reader in the down-home, inbred world of the rural South, where intertwined family histories are common knowledge and some old-timers, like Deborah's unrepentant bootlegger father, still live by obsolete customs. Colleton County also has a growing population of black and female professionals, as well as spreading residential development to accommodate suburbanites from the coastal cities 150 miles away. One of Maron's many skills is her ability to weave into her story the social changes coming to this region with the speed of that hurricane. Agent, Vicky Bijur. Mystery Guild main selection. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chronologically, this story takes place between "Rituals of the Season" and "Winter’s Child." Marilyn Wallace, writing as Maggie Bruce, asked if I would contribute a story that featured some sort of craft for her anthology "Murder Most Crafty." I thought perhaps Deborah could manage a grapevine wreath with a little help from her new sisters-in-law. The story itself was inspired by a real New Year’s Eve bonfire here on the farm when a cousin tried to burn some overly wet wood. I was tickled when my brother said, “Never saw gasoline so wet it wouldn’t burn,” and knew I’d use that sentence in a story sometime. They really did try to chase some lovers out of that lane and yes, they really did get mired down to the axle. (Cover design: Andrea Maron)(Cover graphic: © 2012 Joe Maron)

Originally published in “Crimes of the Heart” edited by Carolyn G. Hart and Martin Harry Greenberg (1993) and republished in “Shoveling Smoke: Selected Mystery Stories by Margaret Maron”, Crippen & Landru (1997). “The whole subject of bridesmaid’s dresses amuses me immensely. No one dress could be equally flattering to any bride’s six best friends, so someone’s nose is always out of joint. And as for their usefulness as a party/cocktail dress? In my lifetime, I have only seen two that might actually be worn after the wedding.” (Cover design: Andrea Maron)(Cover graphic: © 2012 Joe Maron)

Sixty-one days before Detective Mick Cluett is due to retire, someone shoots him out in Sheepshead Bay and his murder quickly triggers the death of a young computer clerk who ran the murder gun's serial number through the data banks four years earlier. As the investigation unfolds. Lt. Sigrid Harald is forced to confront the secrets hidden in her own past. What did Cluett know about her father's line-of-duty death thirty years ago and how involved is her own boss? One of the answers lies with a colorful homeless street beggar. Jerry the Canary had been "nesting" in the girders above the tracks when the young clerk was pushed in front of a subway train, but he's an elusive bird and as hard to catch as a New York City pigeon. Racing through the city's icy streets, Sigrid teams with a black detective from Brooklyn to find him before the killer cooks his goose. Past Imperfect, the 7th in this series, was written in 1990 and I continue to be amazed by all the societal changes in twenty short years. Times Square had not yet become Disneyfied. Sex shops and porn movies abounded there, and tourists were pestered with handbills promising illicit good times in nearby hotel rooms that could be rented by the hour. Every third person was a smoker and smoking was allowed in restaurants, offices, and some movie theaters. The Twin Towers still stood. Subway cars and stations were grungy, and black graffiti covered both the walls and the trains. And the homeless were everywhere (something sadly happening once again, if for different reasons.) On a lighter note, it was trendy for women to "get their colors done," i.e., to learn if they were a Winter, Spring, Summer or Autumn and to choose a wardrobe based on those designations. Those familiar with Sigrid Harald's indifference to clothes and mirrors can imagine her reaction when her Grandmother Lattimore gifts her with such a makeover. (Graphics by Paper Moon Graphics)From Publishers WeeklyThe fatal shooting of off-duty detective Michael Cluett, recently transferred from Manhattan to Brooklyn and days short of his 40-year tenure, sets off the series of intertwining investigations pursued in Maron's engrossing procedural. After the shooting, lieutenant Sigrid Harald, Cluett's boss in Manhattan, learns that he and her own boss had worked with her father, also a policeman, and may have shared a dark secret about his death in the line of duty many years before. The subsequent killing of the computer operator checking on the Cluett murder weapon suggests police involvement and leads Harald to probe her father's death. Alternating with the narrative of her search is the voice of Jarvis Vaughn, a black police detective from Brooklyn whose first-person account gives an intimate view of the internal investigation. Providing continuity and atmosphere with details of the snowy cityscape, Maron ( Corpus Christmas ) writes a terse, technically expert police procedural, its hard-boiled plot undiluted by sentimentality. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com ReviewMargaret Maron, author of Shooting at Loons and Southern Discomfort, continues her saga of change and transformation in fictional Colleton County, North Carolina, guided once again by District Court Judge Deborah Knott. Trouble comes to the county in Up Jumps the Devil with the arrival of the new interstate, which raises property values and pits neighbor against neighbor--even kin against kin. When two residents are killed after refusing to sell their land to real estate speculators, Judge Knott embarks on a quest to find the killer--or killers. The quest also forces her to take a hard look at her assumptions about her fellow townspeople and herself. From Publishers WeeklyWith vivid detail and engaging, credible characters, Maron's series featuring North Carolina district court judge Deborah Knott (Edgar winner Bootlegger's Daughter, etc.) brings to life fictional Colleton County and chronicles a charming but rapidly changing South. Here, the background is the suburbanization of the rural countryside less than an hour by superhighway from Raleigh. A few days after Dallas Stancil refuses to sell his land to a speculator, his stepson and wife murder him. Then, Dallas's peripatetic cousin Allen, the devil from Deborah's past, comes to town. Several days later, Dallas's father, Jap, is killed just before he can divide the property between Merrilee Grimes, his late wife's niece, and Allen. So who killed Jap, and who gets the Stancil land?Dallas's widow? Allen? Merrilee and her husband, Pete? Billy Wall, Jap's partner in the produce business? Dick Sutterly, a real estate developer who has a signed deed to Jap's property? Suspicions extend to Deborah's own family when one of her 11 brothers, visiting from California, reveals that he's lost his job and plans to sell his acreage, which abuts Jap's. In the end, the answer derives from a combination of greed, fear and ignorance of the intricate laws of inheritance. Maron eloquently describes different behaviors toward the land, from stewardship to despoliation. The old-fashioned warmth of the extended Knott family and Maron's well-constructed plot make this series a standout. Mystery Guild selection. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York City Police Detective Sigrid Harald knew something was amiss when she saw the couple. Was it the girl's bloodless face or the glittering hostility in the young man's glance? As Sigrid reached for her ID, the obscenities that streamed from the youth's mouth startled her almost as much as the flickering switchblade which appeared in his hand.

Margaret Maron, New York Times bestselling author and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, returns to Colleton County with an exciting new Deborah Knott mystery . . . LONG UPON THE LANDOn a quiet August morning, Judge Deborah Knott's father Kezzie makes a shocking discovery on a remote corner of his farm: the body of a man bludgeoned to death. Investigating this crime, Deborah's husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, soon uncovers a long-simmering hostility between Kezzie and the slain man over a land dispute. The local newspaper implies that Deborah's family may have had something to do with the murder-and that Dwight is dragging his feet on the case.Meanwhile, Deborah is given a cigarette lighter that once belonged to her mother. The cryptic inscription inside rekindles Deborah's curiosity about her parents' past, and how they met. For years she has wondered how the daughter of a wealthy attorney could have married a widowed, semi-illiterate bootlegger,...

This first novel in Maron's Imperfect series, which won the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 1993, introduces heroine Deborah Knott, an attorney and the daughter of an infamous North Carolina bootlegger. Known for her knowledge of the region's past and popular with the locals, Deb is asked by 18-year-old Gayle Whitehead to investigate the unsolved murder of her mother Janie, who died when Gayle was an infant. While visiting the owner of the property where Janie's body was found, Deb learns of Janie's more-than-promiscuous past. Piecing together lost clues and buried secrets Deb is introduced to Janie's darker side, but it's not until another murder occurs that she uncovers the truth.