This story goes into the everyday life in a small North Carolina town that is sort of sleepy and is suddenly getting a new life because of developers buying up land and building houses on all of the ground that used to be old, home-grown farms nearly everyone of the old families owned and wanted to pass on to their children.  Candace Bradshaw is a Councilwoman who has played the men she works with for a lot of favors, and her daughter is an up-coming willful young gal who doesn't know how much her mother gave away for the price of a new home.  Deborah Knott is from one of the older families and her father twists and turns several deals behind closed doors on both his current and past business dealings, which included running "shine" back during Prohibition.  She is newly married to Dwight Bryant, who just happens to be the local Deputy Sheriff and, because of Candace’s death, is pulled into another mystery which has not been solved.  She wants to protect her family and her job and thus almost gets herself killed while trying to retrieve a bit of evidence that just happened to slip into a place it shouldn’t be.

Ms. Maron is an excellent writer who has won the Agatha Award and several others.   Her writing shows how she is deeply involved and intelligent about the story lines.  I would have liked the story to go on a little longer, as I felt the ending was just a bit too open-ended and quick.  However, that ending may be the opening for the next storyline about Deborah Knott and her new partner in life and family.  Great little story about life in an old southern county that has not started to grow until just recently, interesting characters and lots of depth about all those characters, good and bad, with all the grit still intact.  Death’s Half Acre is an honest look at the seamier side of how some small backwoods places grow up faster than they should.

I will be looking forward to her next book in this series, and I might just have to get hold of some of the other, earlier stories.  I seem to be picking up a good many new authors that I truly enjoy and haven't ever had the incentive to read before.  There were several new / old sayings that I am going to have to adapt to my locality and put into my vocabulary, just because they seem so neat and quaint.  Overall great little read.