Sarah Scott (4)

Sarah Scott's engaging tone in this tale of southern corruption manages to strike an appealing balance between hip and homey, sophisticated and small-town. The sleuth/heroine is a promising figure who starts out having it all in terms of youth, career, success, looks and romance. Clearly, Jolie Marston has plenty to lose as she embarks on a search for righteousness after becoming disillusioned with the trivialities of broadcast news. Indeed, she does lose many of those initial advantages, show more while moving on to discover new values and, incidentally, to solve an intractable murder along the way.

While this book effectively combines a number of motifs, such as those of the old and new South, the one area where I saw room for improvement was in combining elements of genre. At times, the melding of murder mystery, chick lit, family saga, and southern gothic, could have been more seamless. In particular, the rapid pacing I usually expect in a mystery seemed a bit off, due to the accommodation of more leisurely standards borrowed from other genres. I hope these aspects of Scott's narrative may develop further in the next Jolie Marston mystery. show less