Although The Buzzard Table, 19th in the Deborah Knott series, does not officially publish till November 20, it is already being sold in stores around the country. Here is one of the first independent reviews from Nancy Pate, who posted this one at patebooks.wordpress.com/2012/11/08. Thanks, Nancy!
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I don’t think it’s possible for a good Southern mystery not to have family secrets, but Margaret Maron does her Deborah Knott series proud with The Buzzard Table (Grand Central Publishing, digital galley via NetGalley.) She provides a heaping helping of secrets small and large, private and public as her other series detective, NYPD’s Sigrid Harald, joins Deborah and her deputy sheriff husband Dwight on their North Carolina home turf.
Sigrid and her mother, prize-winning photographer Anne Lattimore, have returned to visit the ailing family matriarch, as has long-lost cousin Martin Crawford, an ornithologist studying Southern vultures. He unfortunately manages to be in at the scene of several crimes — the discovery of the dumped body of a murdered real-estate agent in the woods, the vicious assault on a nerdy high school student, and the unexplained death of a man at a nearby airport hotel. The airfield itself is a point of contention as the CIA is using it as a fueling stop.
Maron adroitly shifts perspectives among the characters, including personable Deborah’s first-person narrative, and opens each chapter with fascinating details about buzzards, natural recycling machines who get little respect. They have secrets, too.
