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MOTHER TONGUE, THE
by Teri Holbrook
Bantam Crime Line, February 2001
311 pages
$5.99
ISBN: 0553577190


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Statler's Cross, Georgia is an all white, dying mill community of fewer than 400 people, or just over 600 if you include the people who live in the new subdivision outside the city limits. When a family of Vietnamese refugees, consisting of a 5 year old girl, her mother and grandmother, move into a house in town, rumors start flying. And when they paint their house bright blue, the natives, none of whom have ever spoken to the Nguyens, start plotting against them.

Gale Grayson and her 5 year old daughter, Katie Pru. are back from England living in Statler's Cross with Gale's grandmother, Ella. Nadianna Jesup, the mill girl from the other side of the railroad tracks, who had gone to England with Gale, is now living with them also, along with her infant son. The book on old mills that Gale wrote and for which Nadianna took photographs, has been published, and Gale is now working on a book that will try and help her to understand the death of Tom, her poet husband, just before Katie Pru's birth five years before.

Chief Inspector Daniel Horsford of Scotland Yard, the man who investigated Tom's suicide, is visiting Gale and her extended family. Ken Goddard, a linguist, has rented the house next door, while on a grant from a British University, to study the local dialect, which he claims is derived from the dialect of Cornwall. They are about to sit down to a festive dinner cooked by Ella when Alby Truitt, sheriff of Statler's Cross, and a dinner guest, is called away to investigate the deaths of three men, found shot in a car. Two of the men are local. One is the son of the mayor and the other is a strange man from a reclusive family, the family that Ken is studying. The third is a Vietnamese man who was shot with a different gun.

This is a series that must be read in order. Gale Grayson, widow with one child, goes from unblinking acceptance of her husband to understanding that he was a user, a terrorist, and a murderer before he committed suicide. Holbrook alternates venues. The first book in the series A Far and Deadly Cry takes place in England. The second, The Grass Widow has Gale and Katie Pru back in Georgia. In the third, Sad Water, Gale, Katie Pru, and a pregnant Nadianna, are in England, and now they are back in Statler's Cross. Each book in the series builds on the previous one, and although one can read Mother Tongue as a stand-alone, you will miss much of the character development.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, January 2002

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