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...

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.

Judge Deborah Knott is filling in for a district court judge in High Point, North Carolina, when she is cleverly framed for murder, and must clear her name while searching for the real killer.

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...

Opening night at the annual Harvest Festival carnival and the moonlit autumn evening has brought out half of Colleton Country to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl and Ferris wheel, throw quarters at Polly's Plate Pitch, or toss ping-pong balls into bowls of live goldfish against a cacophony of music, clacking machines and hucksterism. The air is sweetly redolent of hot grease, fried dough, grilled meats and spun sugar... and one whiff is all it takes to send...

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.

As Judge Deborah Knott presides over a case involving a barroom brawl, it becomes clear that deep resentments over race, class, and illegal immigration are simmering just below the surface in the countryside. An early spring sun has begun to shine like a blessing on the fertile fields of North Carolina, but along with the seeds sprouting in the thawing soil, violence is growing as well. Mutilated body parts have appeared along the back roads of Colleton...

It's Christmas in rural North Carolina's Colleton County and Judge Deborah Knott is looking forward to a family celebration when a tragedy clouds the holiday season. A beautiful young cheerleader dies in a car crash and the community is devastated by her death. Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant soon learns that her death was not a simple accident, and more lives may be lost unless he and Deborah can discover why she died.

Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant are back home in Colleton County with all their family and courthouse regulars. But there are a few new faces as well. Lt. Sigrid Harald and her mother, Anne, a well-known photographer, are down from New York to visit Anne's ailing mother, Mrs. Lattimore. When the group gathers for dinner at Mrs. Lattimore's Victorian home, they meet the enigmatic Martin Crawford, an ornithologist who claims to...

"On a quiet August morning, Judge Deborah Knott's father Kezzie makes a shocking discovery on a remote corner of his farm: the body of a man bludgeoned to death. Investigating this crime, Deborah's husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, soon uncovers a long-simmering hostility between Kezzie and the slain man over a land dispute. The local newspaper implies that Deborah's family may have had something to do with the murder-and that Dwight is dragging...