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Populated with colorful, richly drawn characters, Margaret Maron's latest novel captures the flavor of life in rural North Carolina. Arriving in Carteret County, Judge Deborah Knott finds herself in the thick of battles between sport and commercial fishermen and between old and new money. She discovers the body of Andy Bynum, a retired waterman respected by all. With no obvious suspects in the murder, Deborah must find the killer in a place where people shoot at loons, sea turtles, and their neighbors.

The governor of North Carolina has appointed Deborah to a judicial seat in the District Court Division. On her weekends, the fledgling judge has been helping an all-woman building crew complete a home for a needy single mother. Her attempts to gain positive P.R. go awry when her niece is found battered and half-naked in the partially completed home, with Deborah's own bloody hammer lying nearby.

Uncommon Clay delves into the intriguing world of the Nordans, a deep-rooted family of talented yet cursed North Carolina potters. Judge Knott is filling in for another judge who suffered a mild stroke. When she decrees that the divorcing Nordan couple split their valuable earthenware collection, the husband winds up dead, in his own kiln! Many people have motives and the clay wheel swirls with suspects.

At 44, Eve Mozell has a wonderful husband and a creative job. She also has a temperamental teenage son, two headstrong sisters, and a demented old father. As she deals with her family's frequent crises, her days overflow with lengthy phone calls. She is never far from a dial tone. But as her father begins to die, Eve is tempted to disconnect and to sort out her feelings for this difficult man.

No one worries much about the scantily clad woman found strangled in the Orchid Motel, she must be a tourist who brought along her own problems. But when the victim turns out to be the wife of an up-and-coming lawyer, people begin looking suspiciously among themselves for the culprit, and Judge Deborah Knott learns her cousin possesses a mighty powerful motive. While Deborah searches for the vicious killer, a deadly hurricane rages up the Carolina coast, bringing destruction and its own kind of justice.

He was a handsome hell-raiser, a reckless crusader in low-slung jeans—and he was driving Louisa Brannigan crazy! Pete Streeter made terrible coffee, snatched her newspaper, and listened through her walls, but it wasn’t until she got fired from her government job that she was persuaded to join his undercover investigation—and became hopelessly entangled with the sexiest man she’d ever met!

She was the mysterious woman in the long black cloak. He was the sexy guy next door. They shared a common wall between their Capitol Hill townhouses and not much else...until disaster scored a direct hit on the mystery woman's bedroom and the sexy guy's heart. He baked her a cake, she learned to throw a football, there were some misunderstandings in the living room, some mishaps in the yard, and some romantic moments everywhere.

It's the last race of the season, the wheels are smoking, and the temperature is rising at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Alexandra Barnaby is NASCAR-driver Sam Hooker's raceday spotter, his eye-in-the-sky, telling Hooker when to pass and when to let off the gas. From her vantage point high above the grandstand, she's also seeing goings-on in the infield that will change her life.

Killer Market takes the quintessential steel magnolia to the hub of North Carolina's massive furniture industry. Deborah soon gets caught up in the whirl of the International Home Furnishings Market and finds herself a suspect in a high-power murder case. The feisty judge must use her courtroom experience and intuitive skills to strip through layers of deception if she is to clear her own name. Maron draws from her own rural southern roots to craft her trademark authentic settings and characters.

In Up Jumps the Devil, fast-moving progress is threatening to forever destroy the leisurely, heart-warming pace of Colleton County, North Carolina. District Court Judge Deborah Knott sees trouble brewing when plans for a new interstate highway start pushing up property values. Deborah finds herself calming the combatants with down-home wit, but when the squabbles escalate to murder, Deborah is forced to search for a killer uncomfortably close to home.

When racial tension erupts in the sleepy community of Colleton County, North Carolina, Deborah is caught off guard. She is happily tending her own home fires: her simmering romance with Kidd Chapin, the house she's building on her family's land, and her campaign for reelection as district judge. But then the first black church is burned, and all of Deborah's alarms go off.

Stephanie Lowe decides Maine schooner captain and pirate descendent Ivan Rasmussen deserves to be called Ivan the Terrible. The house she just bought from him is falling apart and possibly haunted. He complains about her fish-eye stew and burnt chocolate chip cookies. He makes fun of her hair after she's had to comb it while using a toaster as a mirror. And on top of all that, he has the nerve to be charming, handsome, and overboard in love with her.

Publishers Weekly declares that the "leaves of autumn are in full splendor, and so is Maron's talent in her 10th Deborah Knott adventure". Judge Knott is finally ready to marry her long-time friend Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant and settle down...or is she? She jumps at a chance to fill in for a judge in the high country of North Carolina. But ugly murder haunts the beauty of the Smoky Mountains.

New York Times best-selling author Margaret Maron’s meticulously crafted Judge Deborah Knott mysteries display the work of a master. In the series’ 17th entry, Deborah and Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant are on their way to New York City for a belated honeymoon. Once in the city, however, they get swept up in a mystery involving a stolen package and a murdered doorman.

Margaret Maron’s best-selling Deborah Knott mystery series won instant acclaim upon its debut in 1993. In this 16th entry in the series, the judge is faced with a horrifying holiday murder case. After a beautiful young cheerleader is found dead in a car wreck, Judge Knott’s husband Deputy Dwight Bryant discovers evidence that the death was anything but an accident.Now Knott and Bryant are on a desperate search for a killer before he or she trikes again.

At the annual Harvest Festival carnival, while everyone else is playing games and having fun, someone commits murder. As Deborah investigates, she must struggle to win a carny's confidence while a dark web of dangerous secrets begins to unravel.

Margaret Maron's Judge Deborah Knott mysteries set in rural North Carolina are cherished by discerning readers who value authentic characters and intriguing plots. As housing sprawl creeps across the land, farmers are feeling the pinch. County commissioners have been making lucrative land deals in secret, and now murder brings Deborah and Sheriff Bryant into the middle of a major dispute.

Arly Hanks has caught all sorts of killers since she returned home to Maggody, Arkansas, population 759, but she's never tangled with anyone as devious as the local youth group. While chaperoning a trip to Camp Pearly Gates, Arly watches the kids as closely as she would any hardened criminal, but when teenagers have a mind to get into trouble, there's nothing a police chief can do but limit the damage. She's just about got the situation under control when one of the kids finds a body, and all hell breaks loose in classic Maggody manner.

Be careful what you wish for. A year earlier, with the help of enigmatic industrialist Michael Walker, all of Penelope Drayton Spence’s dreams had come true. Now, as one of the country’s top journalists, she has discovered what she thought would make her happy was only making her busy. After months of avoiding her, Michael Walker burst back into her life with an outlandish plan to launch his controversial “Hermes” satellite into space. But she soon learns someone just as resourceful and well-financed is willing to go to any lengths to stop the launch.

Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author Larry McMurtry is one of America's best novelists. Several of his books are modern classics, including Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning motion picture. Now McMurtry delivers a funny yet sobering road trip novel reminiscent of Thelma and Louise and featuring two of the most original women to appear in fiction for quite some time.