Miss Marple as Sexy Southern Sleuth

Hundreds of mystery novelists have composed their variations of Agatha Christie’s puzzles involving Miss Jane Marple. But few have done it better than Margaret Maron, the North Carolina-based novelist who has earned two Edgar awards for her entertaining series featuring Deborah Knott, a District Court judge for Colleton County in that state. It should be quickly noted that while the judge shares Miss Marple’s affinity for solving crimes in her hometown surroundings, she is younger, prettier and more outgoing than the little old lady of St. Mary’s Mead.

And she is definitely more sexually active. We discover that in the first few pages of Maron’s newest novel, “Home Fires” (Mysterious Press, 243 pages, $22), when Knott’s holiday is rudely interrupted by a phone call from one of her 11 brothers. A wayward nephew has been arrested for desecrating a graveyard in her district. She barely has time to return home and offer her judicial wisdom when someone starts burning black churches in the county, leaving behind one dead body and graffiti messages that seem identical to those in the cemetery.

Are Knott’s nephew and his Southern slacker buddies responsible? Or is there a much more complex motive for the arson and murder? Maron’s whodunit plot is challenging, but it’s her unconventional characters, colorful family histories, and an unblinking, though certainly affectionate, view of the contemporary South that distinguish this well-crafted novel.

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William Bernhardt, who writes legal thrillers set in his home state of Oklahoma (“Naked Justice,” “Extreme Justice”), shifts gears slightly with the seasonable fable “The Midnight Before Christmas” (Ballantine, 225 pages, $14.95). In it we’re asked to ponder two questions. Is divorced, alcoholic ex-cop Carl Cantrell a wife-beater intent on murdering his son on Christmas Eve? Or is there some other equally homicidal scheme at work? Carl’s actions certainly seem to indicate the former to lawyer Megan McGee when Cantrell’s ex-wife, Bonnie, asks her to arrange for a restraining order against him. That accomplished (a major miracle considering how many judges work on Christmas Eve), the two women discover that Carl has managed to remove the boy from his school.

Lonely and seasonally depressed, McGee eagerly allows herself to be pulled into the Cantrell affair, driving Bonnie around town in search of Carl’s red truck. Second miracle: They find it just in time to stop him from forcing the boy to eat food later discovered to contain rat poison. That takes care of roughly the first third of the book. In the remaining two-thirds of this short novel (long novelette would be a more accurate description), there are a number of implausible situations, coincidences and twists of fate. Bernhardt keeps a crucial bit of information from surfacing until long after such revelation is necessary. And while he’s taken pains to make McGee a fully dimensional character, the others seem wafer thin. All of which is to say that mysteries--even those ending on a holiday-appropriate, happily-ever-after note--should be made of sterner stuff.

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In the course of John A. Miller’s “Causes of Action” (Pocket Books, 247 pages, $23), the second book to feature Northern California lawyer Claude McCutcheon, so many of the protagonist’s pals get killed or wounded, the guy should be forced to wear a health warning. The murders aren’t his fault actually. They are to be credited to the account of Jesse Hamilton, a buddy from McCutcheon’s Vietnam days, who has come into possession of a computer disk that the folks at Sentinel Microsystems will do anything to retrieve.

Fearful for the safety of his 4-year-old son, Jesse sneaks the boy into McCutcheon’s digs at night with a note much too cryptic for the circumstances. The bad guys, meanwhile, are hard at work looking for father and son, and slaughtering anyone who gets in their way. Their plan is to use the boy as a bargaining chip in forcing Jesse to surrender the disk. Fortunately for the little fellow, and the reader, McCutcheon is able to hold his own in a world of rugged series heroes. An honorable and resourceful gent who charts his own course, he also possesses a lawyer’s guile, a fondness for life’s absurdities and a remarkable home library that includes a calfskin-bound text of T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

What chance do a couple of slimy Silicon Valley sociopaths have against such a man?

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman on audio books.

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