{"id":870,"date":"2012-12-28T21:04:59","date_gmt":"2012-12-29T03:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=870"},"modified":"2012-12-28T21:04:59","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T03:04:59","slug":"margaret-maron-the-buzzard-table","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/margaret-maron-the-buzzard-table\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Maron: The Buzzard Table"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s a privilege to enter Margaret Maron\u2019s world.\u00a0 She has created Deborah Knott\u2019s world every bit as much as J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter\u2019s, and the texture of it is practically a living thing.\u00a0 On every page, Judge Deborah Knott will be doing nothing predictable \u2013 she\u2019ll be cooking, working, interacting with her husband or stepson or huge (and I do mean huge) extended family.\u00a0 In short, she\u2019ll be living her life, and you\u2019re welcome to join in for the duration of the story.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In this novel, she rotates narrators \u2013 sometimes it\u2019s Deborah\u2019s husband, Chief Deputy Dwight Bryant, sometimes it\u2019s Deborah \u2013\u00a0sometimes, in this novel, she\u2019s turned things over to her character of Sigrid Harald from her earlier (and much loved by mystery readers) series.\u00a0 She brought Sigrid back in the last novel, which was set in New York (Sigrid\u2019s home, where she works as a police detective) and in this one Sigrid is in Deborah\u2019s neck of the woods to be with her mother, Anne, and her dying grandmother.<\/p>\n

The main gist of the story concerns the mysterious Martin Crawford, an eccentric British cousin of Anne\u2019s and Sigrid\u2019s.\u00a0 He\u2019s an ornithologist and photographer who is living on a derelict family property to observe the buzzards (a.k.a. turkey vultures) in the area.\u00a0 He has a big cement slab out by his place where he leaves fresh kill for the buzzards, who swoop around his property and have come to accept him, to the point of following his truck around town.<\/p>\n

There are undercurrents to the story, starting with a horrifying prologue in Somalia, some mysterious plane take offs and landings that have attracted the (illegal) attention of a local student who turns up in Deborah\u2019s courtroom, and as always in a Margaret Maron novel, there\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

The main actors in this story are Anne, Sigrid, and Mrs. Lattimore, Anne\u2019s mother; and Deborah and her new-ish stepson Cal, who has big things on his mind.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a missing real estate agent, Becca, who is proving to be a real dead end for the police as they question everyone who knew her.<\/p>\n

While Maron weaves in some political threads, she\u2019s also ultimately concerned with the family ramifications to any crime, and it\u2019s part of the reason her books are so appealing.\u00a0 I was talking to a long time customer about these and we agreed that the books have a certain rhythm to them, a cadence, and as a reader you have to give yourself over to it.\u00a0 It\u2019s more of a delight to do so than anything else, however.\u00a0\u00a0 I was left at the end of this one (as usual) sniffing back a few tears and looking forward to the next installment.\u00a0 If Sigrid, one of my favorite characters in mystery fiction, can continue to be included, all the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a privilege to enter Margaret Maron\u2019s world.\u00a0 She has created Deborah Knott\u2019s world every bit as much as J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter\u2019s, and the texture of it is practically a living thing.\u00a0 On every page, Judge Deborah Knott will be doing nothing predictable \u2013 she\u2019ll be cooking, working, interacting with her husband or … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-americancozy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":873,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions\/873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}