A mysterious ornithologist staying at Mrs. Lattimore's Victorian home and doing research on Southern vultures seems familiar to Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, especially after a murderer strikes.

While in New York, Judge Deborah Knott has been asked to deliver a package to Lt. Sigrid Harald of the NYPD. Sigrid offers to swing by the apartment with her husband to pick up the box, but when they reach the apartment, they discover that the box is missing and the doorman has been murdered.

Best-selling author Margaret Maron creates entertaining mysteries filled with warm southern charm, colorful down-home characters, and smoldering grudges. In Storm Track, swirling dark clouds of illicit affairs and brutal murder threaten Colleton County, North Carolina. 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...

Best-selling author Margaret Maron's colorful Deborah Knott mysteries crackle with sassy Southern dialogue and rural wisdom. 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. As her own relatives battle lifelong neighbors over...

When Judge Deborah Knott is summoned to her ailing Aunt Rachel's bedside, she assumes the worst. Thankfully when she arrives at the hospice center she learns that Rachel hasn't passed; in fact, the dying woman is awake. Surrounded by her children, her extended family, and what seems like half of Colleton County, a semi-conscious Rachel breaks weeks of pained silence with snippets of stories as randomly pieced together as a well-worn patchwork quilt....

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.

Home Fires tackles one of the contemporary South's most burning issues. 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. Narrator...

Best-selling author Margaret Maron shows the form that has won her the Edgar and Agatha Awards, among many others, in this riveting mystery. Judge Deborah Knott and Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant are due to marry in a week. But all plans are put on hold when an assistant district attorney is killed, and the clues compel Judge Knott to investigate an earlier double murder that may be connected.