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In the tiny Arkansas town of Maggody, outsiders have bought up the old folks' home and land and they are building on it. The fear and rumors about who and what is going on at the location have got the townsfolk in a tizzy. Rumors of lunatics, foreigners or worse living amongst them abound and Arly Hanks, police chief of Maggody, is called upon by everyone to investigate. The problem is that the land isn't in Arly's jurisdiction and furthermore, she'd rather sit and think about her latest beau than bother looking into something that is not breaking the law. The Stonebridge Foundation is a rehabilitation spa that was built in that specific location to keep its famous clientele a secret from the rest of the world. The owners of the new foundation have invested all their money in it and will do almost anything to make certain that it's a success. The people in town are getting even more riled when non English-speaking Mexicans are brought in to work at the Foundation, and when one of the doctors, a man of Middle Eastern descent, walks into town, a hate riot almost starts at the diner. Luckily, Arly is around to stop any violence and manages to get some information about the unknown building to spread around to calm her family and the townsfolk down. But when one of the staff from the foundation is found murdered in the fountain in their garden, Arly is the law officer assigned to solve the case. This is the 15th of the Maggody series and it's the first one I've seen. The writing is smooth and well-paced and there are more than enough quirky characters quipping down home phrases to supply local color to the story. The mystery unwinds nicely enough, but when the guilty party is revealed using a full statement of explanation as to the why and wherefore, it feels as if the author picked the name of the murderer out of a hat and filled in any blanks afterwards. It doesn't come out as part of the fabric of the story and so the ending is anticlimactic. I was also very uncomfortable with Maggody's good old hometown people. I couldn't tell if they were written with a wink and a laugh, because the writing struck me as far too much like an exploitation of all the worst of the prejudices about people in Arkansas. Here's a town where everyone is related to everyone else, below average intelligence seems to be the norm, fear of people unlike themselves can bring up fear-soaked sudden violence, and unforgiving strange ideas about what good Christians do and how they act are declared and acted upon with a vengeance. Since I'm certain that if I ever wandered into a town like Maggody in real life I'd be unwelcome, and more importantly because the resolution of the mystery seemed haphazard, I won't be visiting any other volumes of this Hess series.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, February 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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