Sand Sharks is author Margaret Maron's 15th Deborah Knott Mystery and the first one I've ever read. But after finishing reading it, you can be sure it won't be the last one I'll read. I really liked the character of Deborah Knott and I loved the fact that I had no idea until the last couple of chapters who the killer really was.
In Sand Sharks Judge Deborah Knott attends a summer conference for North Carolina district judges. The conference is at a beach hotel and Deborah is looking forward to seeing old friends and spending all her free time relaxing on the beach. So she's not very happy when she stumbles on the strangled body of another judge. She quickly learns a lot of people disliked the man, whose unethical behavior has hurt a lot people and given the Bench a bad name.
Deborah quickly gets involved in helping to solve the crime when a local police detective asks for her help, since she knows most of the people involved. The investigation gets much more personal when a close friend is run down, and the two crimes seem to be linked.
The best part of Sand Sharks is Deborah herself. She's a very likeable character and realistically written, as are most of the characters in the book. I'd actually go so far as to say characterization is Maron's strongest skill set, at least as far as Sand Sharks goes. I truly enjoyed getting to know each of the characters in the book, and definitely want to go back and read more about them. Although Deborah is happily married in this novel, it is clear she has quite a checkered past where men are concerned, and I'm looking forward to finding out more about all her experiences.
I was a little confused by some of the dialogue in the book. I'm not sure if some of the strange grammar and word structure was supposed to mimic the way people speak in North Carolina, or if it was just bad editing. However, I didn't come across too much of the odd wording, so the few instances of it were easy to ignore.
The plot of Sand Sharks is simple and easy to follow, though I felt Maron was too liberal with red herrings. There were so many red herrings I often felt that some of them must have started out as sub-plots that never got developed. But they were developed enough that at the end of the book there were a couple of story lines I felt were left unresolved and so I was left a bit unsatisfied.
However, perhaps because there were so many red herrings I was never able to figure out who the killer was until very near the end. And that’s always a good thing when reading a mystery!
In the end, it was the character of Deborah who really pulled me in and hooked me enough to want to read more. There’s no higher praise than that, is there?
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